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.

EMO!

Yeah, dunno why.

Clowns

So there was this clown who loved to make people laugh. He wasn’t much different from other clowns but he always felt a bit more special than them. He loved the fact that he could make people happy. He made them laugh til they teared and they always looked out for him in his garish costume. They joked with him, sometimes at him, but he took it in his stride. He was the clown after all. Everyday, the clown would go out into the circus ring and in his own way, make every one happy. Everybody at the circus loved the clown because he was always so happy.

Every night, as the people returned to their homes, happy that they had a good day. The clown would also return to his home. He would sit in front of his mirror and remove his clown makeup. As he stares back into the mirror, he would let out a sigh. As though with that sigh,  he could remove some of  the emptiness inside him.

I make people happy all the time. There is nothing more important than that.

Yet, why do I feel so sad ?

When it rains, it pours. Just a coincidence?

I’m really curious. When bad things happen, do they happen all at the same time? Or, is it just a case of being hypersensitive to your surroundings? I live life in extremes. When I am happy, I am terribly over the moon about things. And when I am sad, I can be the most morose person to be around. I suppose we can blame 51% on my erratic female hormones.

It is really hard to be carefree when things go wrong and it’s absolutely difficult for me to move on just brushing it aside. It’s easy for everyone to sya you know take it easy. I am all for optimism but when things fall apart, I can’t help getting angry. It’s the same feeling you get when u start building a structure out of a pack of cards and it falls apart on you just when you think it is all going well. It makes everything I have seem that much more fragile and transient.It’s more frustrating than the pack of cards analogy because well, it is reality.

I try to look for purpose in what I do and I definitely do things with a goal in mind. I just want to feel good about myself. But it sucks that sometimes, most times, my decisions seem to be wrong no matter how well I think I had thought them out. I have a chip on my shoulder because I was the one to whom everything went right. I can’t seem to able to tolerate anything less than perfect. Sadly, of late, EVERYTHING I have attempted has ended up awry. Makes me wonder about my ability make proper decisions.

My mum thinks I think too much and ask for too much and that contentment never exists in my vocabulary. I try to rationalise and think that all this is probably happening to get me a reality check on what I am doing. When things go wrong, its time to re-evaluate and move on.

I suppose another reason why it feels that I’m standing on cracking ice, is mainly because I have no idea how to move forward. It was all clearcut before but now, there are just so many ways and no one perfect way. Though, my Indian society respects only a couple of those million ways, I have the opportunity to choose. I think that’s most frightening. What if I screw up again? With the number of people telling me to go ahead without thinking too much, you might think that no one here is afraid.

There is no room for fear in this world, eh? Don’t be afraid to make those choice and don’t be afraid to live their consequences. There is no middle road if you want to be independent. It’s not very easy being an adult. And, guess what … sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is just me being me being me-centric. Add all the other relationships with people to the equation and I get one big mess.

I read somewhere in Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera about the beauty of ‘the glittering shades of grey’. I’m not sure on that. Right now, starkly delineated blacks and whites are more appealing.