How it Happens

DAV

I'm a little overcome by sadness these days.

I don't think our levels of joy vs. sadness over time always come out equal. I think that we are unhappy far more than we are happy. Is this because humans are fickle? Or is it simply because there's a wide range of emotions, happiness being only one of them, which proves a simply mathematical equation that shows our happiness to not be small but merely equivalent in our lives to the sadness, anger, fear etc that also crosses our behavioral minds.

I'm overanalyzing.

I am losing my girlfriend. I am poor and losing money. I do not know how to find better work, and there may not actually be better work out there. I an underwhelmed and very jealously upset by the lack of reward and excessive insult I have received from my family after years and years of dedication and hard work for its cause. I feel unmotivated. I have no goals and no direction. I can't even honestly say that I have any kind of dream.

My body is an atrocious broken mess of excessive liquids which clog up my head and cause exhaustion, confusion, impeded hearing and breathing, constant irritation that itches and causes coughing and sneezing (and also makes everybody think that I am sick all the time), chronic peeling and dryness as well as chronic oilyness and zits, dandruff, psoriasis, and any other god-awful skin/allergy disease that makes simple things in life, like breathing, communicating, and choosing a cleaning product without malicious side effects very difficult.

Because I have devoted so much of my life to the family business, I have been out of touch with any real goals, and my college learning suffered some. I have also lost time that I could have spent improving myself and focusing on new goals to get ahead in my desired field in the past 2 or 3 years. The family business has been and is nothing more than a source of constant stress, time consumption, and empty promises. I feel used, and I also feel awful for abandoning such a huge part of my life now, especially since I am simply allowing myself to leave a world of hurt for a world of confusion and indirection. I am upset that I am restarting from when I left college, my only excuse being that I was too loyal to my family to pursue my own empty life.

Finally, I am now a bedraggled college grad in an economic recession without the experience or the skills to impress anybody in my field, assuming there is such a thing as a "field" of English: Creative Writing. My professors lied to me. I am reeling from one bad relationship, one awful relationship with a nasty girl who still threatens to kill me for actions that she made up in her psychotic, derranged mind, and one relationship that became far more emotionally set than I ever expected and is soon coming to an abrupt and unwanted end. My dreams, which were never lofty, but still mildly artistic and free, have been relegated to the teaching of children, who are ungrateful and selfish and cruel and undeserving of the love and caring that I try to provide for them.

I feel like that love and caring is already nearly depleted - for my students, for my girlfriends, and even for my family.

They have nothing to offer. My job doesn't pay well in money and not at all in satisfaction (possibly the opposite). My girlfriends are needy, and they become mortal enemies when the relationships end, which is devastating to both my mental health and my safety. My family is needy and pays me only enough to keep me coming back, but never enough to loose me from the bindings of dependency; perhaps my father's desire to control me will cause him to lose me completely someday.

And at my current dumbass job at the college, which pays virtually nothing (and it isn't much work anyway, so I can't honestly whine much about it, which is something to whine about), which I have because there are no real teacher openings, I am surrounded by the stupidest, most callous and irritating imbeciles who were ever rejected and then grudgingly accepted from and into the academic world. Not to mention the fact that my boss treats me like I belong here, which maybe I do and maybe I don't. I feel like I'm above having neurotic maniacs intrude in every aspect of my life to domineer their disillusionment over my meaningless life, but then again, I've failed.

Therefore, I don't think my sadness is purely a matter of math.