In my initial post, Pretend, I talked about depression and how it affected me growing up. I wound up getting some direct and indirect feedback from that post, which I do appreciate. I say that I don’t really write for an audience, because I am not used to having one, but if at least one person reads it and understand a little where I come from, it’s worth the effort.

The common themes I got in feedback were “Are you happy?” and “Does your wife make you unhappy?”, which is to jointly imply that either I am unhappy because I recall bad events in my life, or my wife causes me to be unhappy, or is oblivious of my happiness.

Let’s address the first.

Happiness is something I regard to be transient. At any given moment, your emotions will change how you feel before changing to something different. The idea that I could be perpetually happy is at best, a farce. No one can ever be happy every second of every day. We often equate happiness to many things, especially money. If I were rich, could I ever be sad? I saw that notion thrown around a lot after Williams’ suicide, that a rich, successful actor couldn’t possibly be sad, and if he was, it was artificial at best. I almost feel like we had to publish the news of his legal and money troubles, and his battles with disease, just to humanize him from the awful “social justice” culture our awful Millennial Generation has created because we don’t know the first thing about social justice. A man can die for no reason at all. I don’t need to know why. He died. He killed himself. He wasn’t happy with something to the point that he willingly chose to kill himself. We seek validation because not because we care or feel for him, we seek validation because we want to assure ourselves that we’re not that sad, that we’re happier than that. I imagine any number of people can read my post and go “Well my life isn’t like that, so I must be doing something right!”. Good for you. Have a popsicle.

Now, I laughed a little more at the implication that my wife doesn’t care about my happiness or is in some way responsible for my state of mind. Any of you who know my wife and I know that we’re probably two of the most incompatible people on Earth. Where I spent my formative years walling myself away from the world and developing interests in games and media to cope, she was out working three jobs, partying with friends, and having more relationships than I. Shortly before we met, I was working fifty hour weeks at Red Robin, coming home soaked in grease, to an apartment with five people living in it, all of whom lacked any social grace or cleaning skills, in order to do it the next day. But I was happy, I was content. Life was good for me. But I was oblivious to the fact that underneath it all, my girlfriend was going to leave me for someone I hated, my arguably best friend at the time was still PTSD-fucked up from Iraq, and my other friends would fragment when the shit hit the fan. When all of that went down, I was a hot mess. I didn’t know what to do. I gave serious thought to moving back to Indiana, rent a room from a relative or somewhere, and find work doing something. I didn’t want to stay in Connecticut. I had no reason to. Then I met my wife.

My wife likes to boast about how she “fixed me” from where I was back then. That I was a “spineless wimp” who wouldn’t stand up for himself, and let himself get run over. The truth hurts. It hurts a lot. I think back to that time and I wish like hell that I punched that kid in his stupid mouth, packed my shit, and left. I wish I had done a couple other questionable things just to spite her. But I thought by playing the moral high road, I’d be the better person. But being the better person comes at a cost of self-sacrifice. I was a miserable sack of shit that played WoW all night for slivers of social interaction and tried to sort out what I wanted for a relationship. Meanwhile she stayed with me, trying to mold me in her image, a reasonably stronger, more assertive person who didn’t take shit for an answer and made people feel bad about themselves. I know few women who can destroy a person’s soul, and one of them is my wife. She means well in some cases, but in others, it is a pure, unbridled passion for being Queen Bitch of the North. I’ve been on the receiving end of that soul-crushing attack many times. It’s not a particularly wonderful feeling, but it was a necessity for me. Call me a masochist, and I probably am, call me whipped, I probably am too. But if you aren’t a chauvinistic shitlord, or a whiny beta-male, you are some hybrid in the middle that can assert himself in a room, but be confident enough to buy tampons from the grocery store with no self-checkout machines.

I am pretty sure this is the thing that holds us together, this variable layer of raw emotional feeling for each other, a mostly-mutual respect for each other’s lifestyle, and a desire to create a future that doesn’t suck. That, is happiness. Everything else is transient. If you base the sum of your experiences day-to-day, adding every time your significant other left the toliet seat up, or you forgot to feed the dog, or dress your child in a raincoat, and use that to fight with each other every night, then you aren’t going to be happy. People make some pretty terrible decisions, but at the end of the day, we continue to be thankful to ourselves, our family, or whatever God we pray to, for getting us through the day, and to allow us to get through the next day. It’s what it means to live in linear time, never knowing what the future holds, only able to experience the present, and remember the past. With no knowledge of what is to come, we conclude that we can only appreciate what happens now, and hope that feeling maintains for as long as possible.

I have no qualms about my life. I have a good wife, a great family, a nice house, a good job, and a few decent friends. I may be introverted, stubborn, arrogant, and direct, I may also be timid, shy, indifferent, and stoic, but I am the sum of my thirty years of experience on this planet. I am the collective knowledge of everyone I have interacted and studied. The whole reason I can be on here and recant my experiences, analyze the response, and formulate new ideas, is because some scientific or supernatural power, whichever you believe in, gave me the ability to use all of my senses and learned experiences to form ideas. I am happy, and I am happy because I am not sad. I am not sad because there is nothing to be sad about right now. What is happening now, is happening now, and it’s good.

I can assure you one thing, life isn’t something anyone should ever throw away easily. It isn’t something that can be justified by any conventional means. No matter what your core beliefs are, we are here because something in this universe allowed us to be. To squander that, or surrender that, to anyone else, goes against the very nature of a transient existence. I live to prove my self-worth, and you should too.