The Happiness in Melancholy

Why do I feel like… Like there is something missing?

Like there is no meaning in anything anymore? There is no purpose in what I do. I am getting more and more disappointed with everything around me. No more zest. No more spring. Just cold routine behaviour which is becoming alien as the days close onto themselves. I close my eyes and a multitude of scenes fill my head. What was, what could have been and what will never be. Wistful, wishful thinking.

The Arabic word found as ḥuzn and ḥazan in the Qur’an and hüzün in modern Turkish refers to the pain and sorrow over a loss, death of relatives in the case of the Qur’an. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk in ^[7] further elaborates on the added meaning hüzün has acquired in modern Turkish. It has come to denote a sense of failure in life, lack of initiative and to retreat into oneself, symptoms quite similar to melancholia.

I have been having this feeling for the longest of times. Some times I think I court melancholy. There is a strange twisted happiness in feeling morose. Me, myself and my thoughts. It makes awesome company to wallow in your own.

Plus it doesn’t help that I am having a massive flu-induced headache and I don’t want to do the mountain of work facing me. And the fact that I feel I have disappointed myself.