Everything In Between

Immediately after arriving in New York City, I turned myself into a tornado of work and worry in order to make sure KinkForAll was the success I desperately needed it to be. To my indescribable relief and happiness, KFANYC wasn’t just a success, it smashed through even my wildest expectations, topping at 45 presentations with well over 100 participants physically present and countless others watching the online feeds. (I was so worried about presentation shortage, I prepared 4, but only ended up needing to present 1. Likewise, I originally thought we’d top off at maybe 35–45 participants, and in the end one of our biggest problems was simply lack of physical space!)

On that front, I’m now looking at the amazing possibility of helping people in sexuality communities who have contacted me from Washington DC, Toronto, and San Francisco emulate the success of New York City’s event in their own hometowns. But not yet…. Not quite.

As the unconference ended, Sara and I were joined by a group of over 20 friends (and friendly acquaintances) for dinner at a nearby Asian restaurant. Despite my hunger (I only ate at the behest of my concerned friends during the day ’cause I was so busy), I didn’t want to finish my meal; I knew that would be the end of dinner, and the day. Nevertheless, day turned to night and as Sara and I walked around the corner for a modicum of privacy, excitement gave way to sadness and we said (temporary) goodbyes in tears.

I retreated from the city then, headed towards Providence, Rhode Island to stay with close friends who generously offered me the opportunity to create a small sanctuary in their spare room. This has been helpful, and I can begin to feel myself recovering, but I’m still having trouble grounding myself in the here and now or focusing on the new tasks at hand. For one thing, there are so many, and for another thing, they are so vastly different from what I’ve just done that mentally changing gears so radically, so quickly, under so much pressure, is actually painful.

When I moved my self and my life half way around the globe to Sydney last year, I felt optimistic about what I would find. Sadly, I didn’t find what I wanted. Now, having moved myself and my life all the way back across the planet and then some, I’m determined to make what I want—because it doesn’t exist yet, and no one knows what it’s going to look like…except me.

My hosts, Emms and Zac, are nothing short of a godsend. They are literally a healing warmth of a magnitude I could not possibly express adequately in words. Unfortunately, shortly after arriving in their home, I fell ill. Of course, this is not at all a surprise considering my physiological history for exactly such mind-body connection.

My attempts to focus on my writing (for my second and much more advanced web development book on CSS I’m authoring; my first book was much more 101-level) have been only partially successful, but I’m encouraged by this anyway. As Emms told me last night while cooking a pasta dinner for us all, “Comfort yourself with the standards of the world,” a piece of advice she wisely preceded with, “Now’s the time to focus on only the most important parts of your chapters.” This, all while taking my hand every time my eyes unexpectedly overflow with the salt water I feel like I’ve been storing up in them.

I’m a little…not annoyed…chagrined at the admission that yesterday was the first full day in more than 4 weeks that I didn’t cry at all. Not only this, but earlier today while my hosts were at their day jobs and I mainlined enormous quantities of tea as though it were a blood transfusion, I couldn’t stop myself from crawling backwards in time towards happier memories. I cried again, embarrassingly loudly since no one was home, and resigned to let my head rest for a while instead of forcing it further into failing attempts to create reusable patterns of CSS code for styling semantic markup.

To help with the memories, I’ve been playing MGMT‘s Kids on repeat for what must be an hour or more now. I first heard it on Australia Day (apparently Australia’s almost-equivalent of America’s Columbus Day), which Sara and I spent with Janek and company at his house on a tropical, warm, rainy day in Sydney. The radio was playing all day but the only song I remember was this one because, somehow, it stood out like a spotlight. I remember laying on the couch in the living room with my head in Sara’s lap, eyes closed, as she pet my head and I purred along with the kittens in the far corner of the room. The memory is emblazoned in my mind’s eye as a vivid still frame.

When Zac came home and gave me a hug to comfort my tears, he remarked on the song. “It’s always weird to hear this song,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Emms and I went to college with them—the band.”

And now I have two memories.

A few minutes ago I awoke in a friend’s bed in their apartment in Harlem. I wanted to do nothing but stay there and not get up. I feel like there is too much to take care of, way too much to handle.

My flight from Sydney to New York City was less than good, better than terrible. I already knew I hated United Airlines, now I’m just more committed never to flying with them again. More than that, I’m frustrated that my flight was so dependent on choices Sara’s family made for her without consideration for me. If little else, I’m happy to be finally out of reach of their influence.

It’s been weeks, literally, since I haven’t cried at one point or another, usually multiple, in the day. I’ve been falling asleep in either tears or unmatched stress and restlessness—each has benefits over the other. Last night was no different.

Today I have errands to run for the KinkForAll New York City event I’m helping to run tomorrow. I’m extremely proud of the work Sara and I have managed to accomplish on it not only for the first time ever in our lives but also literally from the other side of the planet.

Simultaneously, I’ve been chasing and feeling continually frustrated by failing to make significant-enough progress on writing my book on CSS. My co-author Joe has been fantastic, and one particular employee, Clay, from the publisher has also been equally supportive. However, the rest of this project feels extremely precarious and that is endlessly aggravating.

It’s aggravating because it was a project I sincerely wanted to see done well, and have been working toward for a long time. I quit my day job something like 6 months ago now in order to focus on getting it accomplished successfully, but I am now further behind than I was then. Despite my best efforts, life kept throwing me curveballs to the point where I already know it’s not going to be the book I wanted it to be. I’m extremely angry at…everything…for that.

As if that weren’t enough, as many already know by now, Sara and I are no longer together, for reasons I’d rather not discuss quite yet. As painful as this would be in general, this is even more painful when seen in light of the fact that it’s one of the reasons my book has suffered. The book isn’t some great money-maker for me, but rather an opportunity for professional exposure and recognition that I’ve been working towards for 8 years—that’s how long I’ve been making money in the web development industry. To have that opportunity suffer pours salt into wounds that moving to Sydney in the first place had already re-opened and which the loss of this relationship is a 3^rd degree burn.

All in all, I’m struggling to keep professional commitments afloat, organizing a first-of-its-kind unconference for the sexuality communities in New York City, ending a 4-year relationship (with the person I’m organizing the unconference with), and moving across the planet. All. At. Once.

I want to change the channel off of this ridiculous soap opera, but can’t. Instead, I keep playing everything in fast-forward in my head until I can again see a point somewhere in the hopefully not too distant future where everything I’ve worked on is successful and I’m peaceful once again. Please let that day be soon.

If you’re anything like me, you always have a terminal window open. One of the reasons I do this, of course, is because it’s fast. If I want to know anything at all about my computer, all I need do is type the question. The answer, because it’s always text-based, comes back immediately. I don’t have to wait for a window to open or for a pane to scroll. Everything comes at me from a single visual direction, the bottom of my terminal window.

However, there are some occasions when a text-based response to a complicated question isn’t very helpful because it requires so much extra work to understand. For me, the most common example of this sort of issue has always been in looking at time-based information, and more specifically, calendars. Whenever I’m on my machine, I almost always need to look at a calendar.

In the past, I used to go all the way over to iCal. Sure, I can do this using keyboard shortcuts only, but sometimes all I want is a quick answer to “what date is this upcoming Friday?” In situations like that, I’ve lately begun using the cal command, and my oh my, what a timesaver.

cal is kind of like man for dates. Of course, you can get more info by saying man cal to your prompt. The cal program, installed by default on almost all UNIX-based systems (including Mac OS X), has a ton of useful options. However, most of the time, I don’t need more than a few.

For instance, let’s say I just want a calendar of the current month. I can get get a compact, simple month view instead of going to iCal by saying just cal at the command line:

Perseus:~ maymay$ cal
     April 2008
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2  3  4  5
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30

Other options let me ask other questions of cal. Easy, simple, fast. I like it.

So, even though I’m still fighting with the Customer Service department of iiNet to realign my billing cycle with the day (over two weeks late) of when my Internet service actually started, I have to say that the service itself is superb. It may just be because I’m in prime DSL location, only a building away from the DSLAM telephone exchange for my area. Still…I’m getting better Internet speeds than I ever got from Time Warner Cable and Road Runner in New York City. Of course, I am paying a bit more for it, but the quality makes up for the cost for what I’m used to.

Even better, iiNet’s naked DSL service comes with a bundled VoIP plan. This is just as awesome as the Internet service. International calls, I discovered, are only 6 cents a minute to the United States. This means I have options like Skype and really cheap VoIP calls. Not bad for a country in the “technological stone age.”

In some situations, like the odd one I now find myself in, the only way to get Internet connectivity is to use a solution that requires a fair bit of maneuvering. In my situation, I have temporarily obtained a Vodafone 3G mobile card. Unfortunately, the Vodafone Mobile Connect software for Mac OS X as of this writing is obscenely poor. Of course, Vodafone’s software for Windows works without a hitch.

The only way I could get my Vodafone 3G card to work was to fire up a Windows XP guest inside of my MacBook Pro, using VMware Fusion. Connecting to the Internet with the 3G card using the Windows guest was smooth sailing, but that only provided the Internet connection to the Windows virtual machine. I wanted my Mac to be directly connected.

The solution is obvious, but a few gotchas really bit me hard. To get the Windows guest to share its Internet connection from the 3G card to my Mac, I would need to bridge VMware’s virtual ethernet adapter from the Windows guest to the Mac OS X host. Once bridged, both the Windows guest and the Mac OS X host would logically be on the same ethernet network segment. At this point, I can enable Windows XP’s built-in Internet Connection Sharing (stupidly dubbed “ICS” because everything needs a TLA) on the 3G connection so that Windows NATs it through to the bridged virtual ethernet card. Finally, I can connect to Vodafone’s 3G network, and all should be well.

Here’s the gotchas.

First, in order for VMware to actually initiate the network bridge when it starts up, it must detect that a physical link is active on your Mac. In other words, Mac OS X’s Network System Preferences pane must show you a yellow dot next to at least one physical networking device (probably either your “Built-in Ethernet” or your “AirPort” ports). VMware Fusion will give you no errors or warnings that a bridge is unavailable until you try to connect your virtual machine’s network while set to bridge, in which case VMware Fusion will complain with an error that reads: “The device on /dev/vmnet0 is not running.”

Obviously, if you have no other devices to connect to, you need to fake one. The easiest way to do this is to set up a Computer-to-Computer network using AirPort. Just go to your AirPort menu bar item and select “Create Network…” and create the network (preferably encrypted). If you check System Preferences now, you should see a that AirPort has a yellow dot next to it and reads as having a “Self-Assigned IP Address.” Now that you have a physical link on your AirPort card, you should be able to start the VMware Fusion virtual machine with bridged networking mode without incident.

However, if you do encounter the above error anyway, you need to restart the VMware network bridge. You can do this either by shutting down VMware completely (turn off your guest operating systems, and quit the VMware Fusion application), or you can run the following commands as an administrator in Terminal, which will stop any bridge currently running (or do nothing if no bridge is running) and then restart it, providing the output as shown:

sudo killall vmnet-bridge
sudo "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-bridge" -D vmnet0 ''
Entering event loop...
Examining network configuration...
Turning on bridge with host network interface en1...

Obviously, you may be asked for your password as you perform this procedure. Note that the trailing two apostrophes are single quotes with no space. This is (almost) how the VMware Fusion boot.sh script starts and stops the network bridge. Specifically, you’re telling the vmnet-bridge application to run in Debug mode and to bridge vmnet0 to whatever is the current primary networking interface. In the example output shown above, this is en1, or my AirPort card connected to the computer-to-computer network I created in the previous step.

Hopefully you won’t have to mess with the vmnet-bridge application, as this should happen on its own when you start up VMware Fusion if you have any physical link on a network device. Nevertheless, I’ve found this is sometimes unreliable, so just in case it doesn’t now you know how to bring up the bridge on your own. (Tip: once it’s up, you can CTRL-Z to pause it, re-start it with fg %1 and then quit Terminal if you like. The bridge will still be up.)

Now that the AirPort card has a physical link, and the VMware network bridge is running, the next step is to configure your virtual machine to use bridged networking. Just go to Virtual Machine → Network → Bridged as normal. Make sure Connected is also selected. Now start up your Windows guest.

Once Windows boots, go to the Network Connections window by selecting Start → Connections → Show all connections. At this point, your “Local Area Connection” in Windows probably has a warning sign on it and reads as having “Little or no connectivity.” It probably has a self-assigned IP address just like your AirPort card. That’s fine—as long as it’s not “unplugged,” we’re in good shape.

Next, select whatever other connection you want to share the Internet from (in my case, the 3G modem, but it could also just be any other connection in the window), right-click it and select Properties. Go to the Advanced tab and make sure “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection” is checked. The other boxes won’t matter.

What this does is turns on Windows’ own NAT service that configures the one connection (the one your sharing) as the WAN side of (yet another) virtual networking device and the Local Area Connection (the one we’ve bridged to our AirPort or Built-in Ethernet card on our Mac) as the LAN side. Hit OK as many times as is necessary to close the network connection properties windows and wait a few moments. Sometimes this can take up to 30 seconds or so, but eventually you’ll see Windows announce that “Local Area Connection is now connected.” If you inspect it, you’ll see that the IP address configuration has been automatically assigned as a “Manual Configuration” with the address of 192.168.0.1, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and no default gateway.

As a last step, now we can actually connect to the Internet using whatever service we have. In my case, this is when I hit the “connect” button on my Vodafone Mobile Connect software. Once the connection is established and the Windows XP virtual machine can see Internet, it takes up to another minute or two (or three) for the Mac’s connection to get an IP address from the Windows guest, but it invariably works.

If the Windows side of things is giving you any trouble, the most reliable solution I’ve found is to simply disable, then re-enable whatever connection isn’t behaving as desired. If after all of this your Mac still doesn’t get an IP address from the Windows XP guest, disconnect and then re-connect the virtual machine’s ethernet card (by toggling the “Connected” menu item in the Virtual Machine → Network menu). Also, of course, be doubly sure that your AirPort is set to “Use DHCP.”

Phew! So simple…and yet so much harder than it had to be. I found the following two PDF documents very helpful in understanding all of this. You might too:

1. VMware Fusion Network Settings — a super-brief, but excellent introduction to VMware’s network setting internals. It’s also a PDF download attached to the linked forum thread.
2. Share Windows XP Guest Internet Connection with OS X Host HOWTO — This basically describes the same thing this post does, but it does so using absolute step-by-step instructions. It’s also a PDF download attached to the linked forum thread.

By way of example, I am being completely devoured by mosquitos sitting on a bench somewhere in Newtown, a suburb of Sydney. I’m leeching wifi in quite literally the only freely open, non-commercial wifi spot I’ve been able to find in the entire city after searching for such a spot for more than a week. Turns out, Internet access here is obscenely expensive—even by American standards—which partially explains the lack of free, open Wi-Fi.

Leeching this wifi is incredibly uncouth, I know, but I justify my behavior with the fact that I absolutely must ensure that my finances are in order in time for things like rent payments and every other opportunity to use the Internet—my only means of banking at this point—have been unavailable. Indeed, even the most common “free hotspot” service in this city, uConnect, provided by Unwired, shuts off at 7 PM. In fact, most of the city shuts off relatively early, save for nightspots and pubs.

The University of Sydney campus is, for the most part, closed on weekends. Those of you familiar with New York’s collegiate services would be appalled at the notion of something like your college library being closed at anything other than normal 9-5 business hours, but that seems the norm here. Similarly, back to the Internet access frustrations, all (and I mean every) bit of bandwidth you use on the University’s network is monitored and, ultimately, limited. The University has a Squid HTTP proxy set up which you must use to get anywhere on the Internet, but each account has a bandwidth cap of 2 MB per day, barring cache hits, of course. Beyond that, and you pay by the megabyte.

All Internet access, it seems, has bandwidth caps like this. There’s a veritable alphabet soup of ISPs that provide similar services, most over ADSL technology, since cable is hard to come by. Very frustrating, as I’ve never before had to think about how and where my bandwidth is being spent.

In any event, aside from the Internet access woes which were sadly unexpected, there are a number of other things about Sydney that are very different that New York City.

In restaurants, water is either self-serve or comes in bottles instead of being poured into glasses. This is a great idea, because it means I’m much more likely to actually have water when I want it. Also, waiters and waitresses expect no tip, so your bill is all you pay. This has two side effects, one rather nifty, and the other very uncool.

First, because your waiter isn’t your personal server for the meal, any and all waiters will wait on you at your behest. None of this, “I’ll call your waiter” non-sense. Makes restaurants seem much more cohesive, egalitarian—a theme in this country. Secondly, because wait staff get no tips, they get paid much better than they do in the states, which in turn raises prices for the meals. This goes so far as to change the prices on menus during “public holidays,” when—presumably—wait staff get paid time and a half. Menus often say “surcharge applies on public holidays and weekends” to indicate this.

And speaking of menus, there’s a whole different language for coffee here than in the states. Regular coffees as we know them in NYC are called “long blacks” here. Contrast this with a “short black,” or single espresso. “Flat whites” are lattes served in coffee cups, whereas “lattes” are lattes served in regular water glasses. Why the distinction? I have no idea.

Some things are the same. Mochas, for instance, are coffee with chocolate. (So are the “stop” buttons on the public transit busses, but I digress.) Other coffee slang bits sound way too Starbucks-ese for me to like them, such as “Vienna long black,” which just means a long black (regular) coffee with whip cream on top.

If you order any coffee, don’t expect a refill—there’s no such thing as free refills here. In fact, everything, even the tiniest bit of luxury, is charged here. It costs you 10 cents per printed (B&W) page at the University of Sydney computer labs to print anything (but pages here are not the normal 8-and-a-half-by-11 that you’re used to in the States). If you want hot water at the showers after taking a swim at Bondi Beach, for example, then you drop a 20 cent coin into the shower stall. Say you want some condiments for your fish and chips, like ketchup? That’ll cost you 80 cents in addition to the price of your food. Tartar sauce is more expensive, at $1.10 per several-ounce dish.

Food in general is obscenely expensive, and at first I thought it was just me, but after talking to locals it seems everyone’s noticed the price increase. The past 7 summers in Australia have been very dry, so dry that the drought caused harvest yields to decrease dramatically, raising food prices by more than 30% in the past several years. Couple this rising inflation concerns, weakening U.S. Dollar strength, and what I’m left with as an International traveller is the grim prospect of paying almost $15.00 (USD!) for a bacon and egg breakfast with a single, non-refillable coffee at any decent café.

Similarly expensive are spirits and liquor, which in addition to being taxed at 10% like everything else under Australia’s national “Goods and Services Tax” (GST), have an additional tax associated with them dependent on their alcohol content. This means my favorite liquor, Tequila, costs about $70 AUD for a 750 ml bottle of Cuervo. Forget the really good stuff like 1800 Resposado or Patron, which are upwards of $100 for the same amount. Sigh.

As a result of all of this, my money is not going nearly as far as I would have hoped. I am looking forward to having an actual apartment—with an actual kitchen—because at least when that happens I can stop paying exorbitant prices for food. It’s nearly impossible to cook in the hostels Sara and I have been staying at because they’re simply uncomfortable, not private, and not very well-equipped. And to top it all off, I think my hostel’s bed is giving me allergies.

I have a job offer, assuming I can get permission to work from the New South Wales government. Ironically, permission to work is also something I have to pay for—how crazy is that?—so I’ve had to rush to set up bank accounts as soon as I got into the country. The banks, for what it’s worth, are surprisingly good even though everyone here says they are terrible thieves. This makes me think no one from this country would be able to put up with any bank from the States.

The best thing about my bank is that it has CSV, QIF, and MNX download options for every single data table presented on their web site. This is, interestingly, the biggest selling point for me but something no one at the bank had any clue about. It’s not mentioned in their marketing material, their sales staff had never heard of it, and the only reason I knew it existed was because I saw a screenshot with the words “export data” on the corner. I took a chance and set up my account with them based on this screen shot and it looks like it payed off. Machine-readable financial interchange, baby!

Conclusions? This country is in what I consider to be the bronze age when it comes to technology. Only the elite technophiles—looked down upon as “tall poppies” here, rather a bad thing what with the whole egalitarian society thing—even know their way about anything other than a web browser or Microsoft Office. That being said, everyone knows how to lock their wifi, even if they don’t know how to change the channel so that they can actually broadcast that signal more than 10 feet in any direction.

Tonight’s my first of a little over a week’s worth of nights alone. When this ends, I’ll be on the other side of the planet. I’ve turned out the lights maybe four times already, trying to get ready for bed, but my body just won’t shut down despite its utter exhaustion. I really hate this feeling of waiting—having at once nothing and everything to do. I really hope I get some rest.

Dear Mr. Gilbert,

My name is Meitar Moscovitz, and I am hoping that this letter serves two purposes. First, I want to express to you an enormous degree of thanks that, no matter how I try to codify it in writing this letter, seems to defy explanation. In part, this is because I have yet to understand just what sort of impact learning about you and your work is going to have on me. My (as yet admittedly slim) exposure to your work came first about two years ago when I saw your presentation appear on the TEDTalks video blog.

It was informative at the time, but I failed to make the information personally applicable to me then. Today, however, I am finding myself in a situation that is, for want of a better explanation with the ability to include copious back-story, at the point before a major turning point in my life in three major ways. (I am moving to Australia from New York City, where I have lived all of my life, with a girlfriend with whom my relationship is “complicated.”) As I’m sure many other people have done when presented with such a life-changing event, I am asking myself why I’ve never been able to “be happy” before, and whether such drastic change is really going to help.

A part of my story, and the second reason why I’m writing you, is that at the age of twelve I was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. That diagnosis became an explanation for others to explain my dissatisfaction with my life, yet it’s an explanation I have always felt lacked real substance, even if it did put at least one more piece of the puzzle together. As far back as I can remember, I have always been wanting, rarely able to work joyfully, rarely able to love without fear.

Today, when I watched your talk on the TEDTalks video blog again, a lot of things you said became instantly pertinent in ways it had not been two years prior the first time I saw it. Suddenly, thanks to many other “pieces of the puzzle” beginning to fall into place, especially those that began to explain hardships in concrete ways (my various relationship struggles not least of them), I was able to understand how and why I might differ in regards to my seeming inability to achieve lasting happiness, in contrast with certain friends and, indeed, my girlfriend, who seems remarkably capable in this department.

Due to all of these things, I am now finding myself very interested to learn specifically about how and in what ways the concepts of neurodiversity, and specifically as it relates to “mental illnesses” such as bipolar disorder, correlate with your findings on synthetic happiness. Are people diagnosed with mental illness, such as I am, routinely less able to manufacture synthetic happiness than people who are not? If so, why, and in what ways?

I’ve spent a significant chunk of today searching the Internet for anything that might relate to the intersection of these two psychological and psychiatric disciplines, but have not turned much up. I would be greatly appreciative of any further information you might have on the topic, or pointers to where I might find such material. Either way, I’ll just keep looking anyways. :)

Thanks again for a marvelously inspiring and informative presentation.

Sincerely,
-Meitar Moscovitz
–
Professional homepage: http://meitarmoscovitz.com/
Personal homepage: http://maymay.net/

I’ve slept most of the day. I haven’t even really slept, but I’ve been in bed and haven’t gotten up. I woke up at 9 AM at first, feeling full of energy but wanting nothing more than to go back to sleep. I woke up again, finally, at 2 PM or so after tossing and turning for hours.

In less than two hours of being awake, I was crying in fits and starts on my bed again. I wanted to tire myself out again so I would go back to sleep. I just want to go away and hide.

I suppose it is not surprising that just after the turn of the new year on all of our calendars, everyone and everything is seemingly reflecting on measurements of their own happiness and satisfaction.

I just took a little Happiness Formula test and the result I got is unsurprising:

Slightly below average in life satisfaction

People who score in this range usually have small but significant problems in several areas of their lives, or have many areas that are doing fine but one area that represents a substantial problem for them. If you have moved temporarily into this level of life satisfaction from a higher level because of some recent event, things will usually improve over time and satisfaction will generally move back up. On the other hand, if you are continually slightly dissatisfied with many areas of life, some changes might be in order. Sometimes we are simply expecting too much, and sometimes life changes are needed. […] Some people can gain motivation from a small level of dissatisfaction, but often dissatisfaction across a number of life domains is a distraction, and unpleasant as well.

For obvious reasons there’s been a lot of work done about trying to understand happiness. Everyone seems to have their own way about it, too. Something in this citation from my test result gave me a flashback.

When I was about 14 years old, I was a regular attendee of the Mood Disorders Support Group of New York (MDSGNY, for short). It was filled with people nearly twice my age, battling similar issues in much the same way that I was, with mood disorders ranging from mild depression to severe bipolar disorder and even frighteningly notable dissociative disorders. A common thread of advice that was given to us was that “people like us simply can’t expect to achieve the same accomplishments that people without these difficulties can.”

I found it insulting, and I was consistently questioning why that assumption was held so tightly with such a prevalent view. No one would ask why, or even seemed at all distressed by the fact. It was simply a matter of fact to most of the other attendees, and they seemed content with their resignation to accept it.

For a long time I’ve been struggling with understanding how other people seem so simply “predisposed to happiness” whereas I feel as though I am cursed by being “predisposed to sadness.” A short time ago, I wrote this:

In the search for answers people can come up with so many different rationalizations. It’s endless. The other day, I went to another party that I didn’t have a great time at through no fault of the very awesome hosts. This is becoming a trend I don’t like.

So, naturally, I instinctually come up with (endless) rationalizations to explain why. Every single thing I come up with is pure crap, of course, because it doesn’t really matter why I had a bad time since (surprise) it doesn’t change the fact that I had a bad time. No reason even has the potential to make me feel any better at all except for reasons that hinge solely on my own failings, because those are the only ones in which the situation was anything that “I could have done differently.”

Naturally (I have to imagine), thinking of my own failings makes me feel even worse. The net result is a cycle of thoughts that makes me feel bad and not good and in no way able to be happy about anything. And then I start to get quiet and go inside and want everything to stop.

This is such a typical thing. Everyone does it but from my vantage point it looks as though people react differently to such internal thoughts. I can’t see how they do that.

Most recently, it’s my relationship and social satisfaction that has seemed doomed to failure. I saw an interesting article on the BBC news web site about just such a thing: that researchers believe accepting sadness and resigning oneself to deal with the difficult times instead of believing in a fantasy where such sadness is simply gone, may in fact be one element of successful relationships. Another interesting quote from the article was this:

“The field of mental health perpetuates this myth with the very concept of “mental health,” which implies a state without suffering,” they say.

In other words, the very idea that sadness and difficulty is a sign of “mental illness,” judged only with the one-dimensional simplicity of the binaries of “mentally healthy” versus “mentally not healthy,” is worse than simply incorrect, but rather actively harmful.

In relationships, I have an unflinching confidence in myself to be able to “stick with it” through the bad times, but a persistent fear that my partner will never do the same. No other partner has proven themselves capable of this; each of them has high-tailed it and ran, and none want anything to do with me anymore.

It feels so circular.

A friend of mine recommended the blog of Penelope Trunk to me the other day. It was a wonderful recommendation. In one of her articles that I read, she says of the job hunt:

When it comes to career schemes, we simply do not have accurate imaginations about what life will be like for us in different situations, said Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, when I interviewed him. Our most accurate information about what will make us happy comes from snooping in on other peoples’ lives to see if they are happy. And the best way to watch other people is to be in a variety of offices. Gilbert calls the informal process of judging other peoples’ happiness “surrogation,” and he says, “surrogation is the best way to predict if we’ll be happy. Observe how happy people are in different situations.”

This seems incredibly applicable to other arenas, such as personal fulfillment as well as social satisfaction. I’m heartened to see that my hard work and continuous efforts mimic this approach, even if I’m clearly not happy most of the time yet.

So, I don’t know. What makes you happy?