Happy Families Are All Alike
The novel Anna Karenina begins with the line:
"Happy families are all alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way"
I've always loved that line because it isn't just about families. I don't think. It's pointing to something we all already know, which is that happiness, when you're experiencing it, feels pretty simple, and usually, its causes are easy to explain if you're having a bad time.
Though you might not be the first person in history ever to have had that problem, each sad is tragically unique and it's one thing to be sad. It's another to be sad about something odd and strange enough that you're convinced you'll never be able to properly explain it to another human being.
Please, bear with me, I will get quite pretentious now.
Lately, I have started taking new medications that started to make me feel better. I can know that because I used to go every day to sleep hoping I would never wake up the next day, and apparently, many people do. It is not just a simple thought. It is a genuine wish. However, now, I sometimes think about what I should wear for the next day, and if you know me well, you would know that is something pretty unique in my case. And through all that, I wondered, is that truly what happy people feel like?
The problem is, I was not really fond of the way I felt. I thought happiness, as people would seem from their stories on Instagram, was much bigger of a huge deal. It felt almost just like feeling gray but with an additional cherry on top. Nothing euphoric, nothing spectacular. Unlike my sadness, and depression phases, where everything was violent and my words were shaking the ground and the keyboard I use to type at. Here, there is nothing that magnificent to write about.
And I wondered, is that all to it?
I think this all just goes on I think.
It doesn't stop until we stop. Life phase after life phase, the illusion of understanding inevitably usurped by yet stranger problems arriving then. Strangers who arrive in one's life with the solution and are no longer strangers but friends. That the only control one can ever truly maintain is whether we dance or despair, when confronted with such a constant lack of control just like Joanna Newsom sang the nullifying defeating negating repeating Joy Of Life.
This constant process of thinking you've got it licked then Starting Over Again with new problems completing the final theory of you and the world and realizing it's just the beginning of a whole new class of theories of you and the world many of which you'll never solve. And so you say goodbye to final theories isn't that okay. I think it's okay, rediscovering yourself, rediscovering the world all those basements down there, all those belfries above. Isn't it cool being remade?
I'll keep walking until I can't like all of us off the veranda and out into the blue morning, with friends I hope, and we'll find more friends and walk with them too, I hope, and blunder and regroup and blunder and regroup.
I hope we'll remember I hope I'll remember if I am back to depression that there's Beauty in it all, that we do emerge from darknesses and we're helped out of them by the authored hands of those we love more often than we scramble out ourselves.
I hope we remember that there's Beauty in it all that we do emerge from darknesses though we're here now that that's enough that we do this together that we do this together.
I think that's enough, I think that's enough and I think that's enough.