All my life — at least as long as I can remember — I have been followed by a vague sadness.
I think I was virtually born that way; blessed with a particular brain chemistry that finds a strange beauty in the slightly forelorn.
It’s not that I don’t feel happiness; moments of joy; of jubilation… but when the silence settles around me, I invariably default to a state of melancholia.
Not anger
Not regret
Not sorrow
Way back in the when of my past, my therapist of record assessed me as ”not exactly depressed, but with evidence of mild dysthymia.” That’s fancy psych speak for someone who experiences life through a mildly gray filter.
She also said that it is likely more common than most people are willing to acknowledge, but I seemed uniquely able to not shy away from the feeling, instead allowing it to wash over me whenever it wanted to. Evidently most people "can't handle" feeling sad.
We live in a world where ”happy” is seen as the ideal, so those who don’t live in a constant state of seeking happy clearly have ”something wrong” with them.
Sometimes melancholia feeds on itself. I recognize that I may not have made much of my life — in the conventional interpretation — because I was not ”cheerful enough” to make a difference in the places where I found myself.
And now? In some ways, it feels like living in a slightly surreal limbo that might last until the end of my days on this planet. What has already been casts a large shadow… and even when I try to move away from those shadows of the past, they do precisely what shadows always do — they move with whatever is casting that shadow.
Such is life; the further along we get the greater the experience behind us while what lies ahead is always shrinking… little by little.
At some point, we make peace with what is. And we do our best to make the most of that, and to not get lost in comparisons between what could have been and the path that leads to precisely here.
Sometimes I have been asked ”How did you get to BE like this?”
And the only substantive answer I can offer is what I said up top: I was born this way.
It makes sense, in its own way. While most people are somewhere within striking distance of ”average height,” there are also people who are extremely tall or short… but that does not make them ”defective,” as human beings.
And so, why would there not also be those who are born on the more melancholy end of the temperament spectrum… and why would that be classified as deficient or defective?
Just something to contemplate…
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2026.10.14 01:48 PDT
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