Everything In Between

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
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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?

My mind is in Schrödinger’s box.

Am I asking too much? Why can’t I just go to parties and have a good time?

One of the patterns that has always been supremely obvious in my life (to anyone who has bothered to look) is that when I am depressed or upset I will often withdraw towards the things that give me comfort and that these things have typically fallen into one of two categories:

• Creative but non-technical pursuits (e.g., writing, philosophy, social theory)
• Knowledge-seeking activities, typically very techical ones (e.g., computer skills of various kinds, histories or scientific studies)

What is amazing to me is the sheer enormity of the number of people who have (or have had) authoritarian figures in my life in some capacity or another (e.g., parents, school teachers, employers, administrative personnel) who have completely missed this whole point and, associatively, everything it explicitly means and implies.

This makes those observant enough to notice it that much more valuable, and, sadly, makes me that much more upset when I fail to take advantage of such valuable resources in my life.

It’s hard to talk when I’m sad. I want to, but I just can’t make my mouth make any sounds that form words. My father realized this when I was younger. One time, and only one time, when I was upset and feeling like I couldn’t talk, he set me up in front of a computer with a text editing window and asked me to type my responses to his questions. He was clever; his questions were simple yes-or-no questions at first. I think he realized that it was even difficult for me to type anything more than that at first. Slowly, as he sensed my body language change, he would start asking more complex questions that required more complex answers. Yes or no responses soon turned into short sentences and soon after that I was pouring my heart out onto a digital notepad.

That is how well my father understood how to communicate with me, for I am all but incapable of communicating actively when I am in such a state as that.

Interestingly, it is only around another person that that state causes such a complete shutdown of my communicative faculties. Alone, I am still quite expressive, as this short piece illustrates, for it was written shortly after I was left alone in just such a state. Furthermore, an internal dialogue is constantly running through my head in these states. Indeed, I am very expressive in every meaning of the word, except in outward appearance. Small gestures such as the slight twitch of a finger are in fact huge, sweeping, screaming motions, so loud as to silence my own thoughts for a few moments and yet so invisible to an outside observer that I somehow feel that much more unheard when someone—through little fault of their own—fails to recognize it.

This is unendingly frustrating. I am at once both completely irrational and unreasonable, unforgiving of people’s blindness towards me and at the same time intolerably chastising myself for being so incommunicative. The internal war feels as though it is enough to tear me limb from limb, which in addition to making it hard to speak makes it hard to move. Muscles become at once weakened and strengthened, incapable of lifting the weight of my own extremities and yet ready to unfurl in so spectacular a display of speed and strength at a moment’s notice that one might believe them to be constructed as though they were made of some giant wound metal spring.

I do not understand why it is so insanely impossible for me to break from these states. Of course, in moments of obvious sanity I tell myself that it is precisely insanity that makes me so distraught. However, this very thought also makes me wonder how I can be so sanely aware of my insanity and yet be so unable to do anything about it.

Something from tonight that I said that I want to remember:

The thing about being strong is that being strong means not getting what you want or what you need and yet being okay anyway. When I was young and, of course, even these days, I don’t always get what I want or need. I can do it, but I don’t like it. When I was young, my father would regularly tell me to be generous. The thing about being generous is that it makes it easier to be strong. That’s what my father was trying to teach me, I think. That’s really a very smart thing to teach a child.

Bah. It is beautiful outside but I can’t remember how to smile at the weather.

My crappy ISP (named after a cartoon character) has been spotty all week, frustrating my attempts to be productive except in the case of playing with nmap. So I find myself playing with the WordPress to LiveJournal crossposter instead. This amuses me because now my posts from this blog will be posted to LiveJournal which will be fetched back to my LiveJournal mini-blog, and which will also appear on FaceBook. That’s what you get for unleashing content syndication on a restless boy.

Mostly, though, I want to shake this icky feeling and playing with technology can kill a lot of time.

I should preface this with yet another warning that what follows is the incredibly hysterical ranting of an emotionally stressed person and should probably not be taken as anything other than an expression of the emotions currently running through my head.

Oh my god! This can not be happening to me. I simply can not deal with this.

There has been an ongoing issue at my work about training. After the absolute disaster at the last engagement I was on, I was promised three weeks of training–something I’d been asking for since after I finished my “official” training that I felt didn’t really help me at all because of the unorganized, utterly abysmal experience that was. Then it was two weeks. Then it a little more than one. Then it was just cancelled, and I was next put on an assignment that allowed me to work from home.

This working from home thing was awesome, because it meant two things. First, that I would get the chance to actually use the product I’m supposed to be an expert in supporting as opposed to looking over someone’s shoulder while they use it because they don’t want me touching their computer network due to the company’s security restrictions, which is what was happening at the disaster client. Second, it gave me the chance to work from home (duh), which is honestly not something I really care that much about for any reason other than the fact that it meant I don’t have to dress in ways I don’t feel comfortable and maintain this mask of someone who I’m not for the sake of the business. Admittedly, that is a big deal, but it’s not a dealbreaker, y’know? (I don’t actually have any problems being professional, but there’s a huge difference between being myself professionally and being a certain kind of professional that has to fit into the molds of the B2B corporate American mold. I can be professional, but I will never fit into that mold, not by a long shot.)

The really annoying thing about getting the chance to work from home, however, is that all this opportunity to spend at home is happening while Sara is in freakin’ Australia on the other side of the fucking world! Sara has been gone since january 24^th (and I missed her a ton immediately), the same day I fell awfully ill with the flu for half a week. It’s been an unbelievably long amount of time and the whole experience, for many reasons that I won’t go into here, has been harrowing in ways I wouldn’t have imagined to the point that I’m insanely anxious about simply getting to see her again because the thought fills me with a crazy sort of unimaginable fear. (I feel so stupid for being this scared about it.)

Now she is finally returning, though because of flight delays I don’t know exactly when, and I expected a call from her some time this morning but haven’t yet gotten one and it’s already 2:30 PM, so this whole airline delay thing may very well cut into our weekend plans. I have already booked flights for myself to Maine and for us to come back on Sunday night. I had to juggle my plans around because this next week at work was planned to be a formal Oracle database training intensive, which I have been looking forward to ever since my first day on the job when I learned about these training intensives because one of my bosses told me I had just missed (by a couple of weeks) the week of intensive Python training taught by Mark Lutz, the author of Learning Python, Second Edition. In brief, I cancelled my Monday day off that I would have spent as an additional “welcome back” period with Sara in Maine that I had asked for (and earned because of the fact that I worked the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday) in order to attend this Oracle training–because I wanted to.

Now, I just got an email from another engagement manager (a boss, basically), that they want me to fly out to Washington State so that I can be there on Monday through (probably) Friday. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?! If I am made to go all the way across this fucking country on the first week of Sara’s return (this upcoming week) for a client who has offered me no real idea of what the fuck I’m supposed to do instead of the training everyone else is getting and that I was expecting from everything I was told at my interviews (I literally asked people “Why did you join this company,” and everyone told me because the learning opportunities were immense–which is true, the opportunties are immense and wonderful, but I want some of them too, damnit!), then I am seriously considering simply saying no and quitting my job on the spot. I simply don’t think I’ll be able to handle that, and with all of this turmoil and absolute torture this job is putting me through, I don’t think I’d feel as if it were such a loss (except financially).

I feel like every single fucking thing is going wrong right now. I don’t feel as though I have a damn shred of support (I know I do really, but it’s so far away), an ounce of understanding (again not really true, I have friends who can understand, but I don’t think Sara really can on anything but a cognitive level–not to say she doesn’t have struggles or that her battles are less important or easier than mine, but she does not have these struggles that I have and by that very fact simply may not be able to relate experiencially to what I’m going through), and the worst luck (and please don’t tell me to count my fucking blessings, that is not what I need right now; I know damn well what my blessings are, thank you). What makes it so unbelievably painful is that the whole of my experiences is so much less priviledged than Sara’s, who’s just been on a wonderful vacation for six weeks and is returning to the wonderful feeling of coming home for a weekend ski trip and to her boyfriend who is supposed to be ecstatic to see her. And I am ecstatic to see her again, but I am so stressed out and emotionally high strung right now that I feel as though I wish she isn’t going to have to put up with this from me.

I spoke for hours with my friend who’s staying with me (after her own horrendously painful breakup the week Sara left for Australia) and she told me that I have to start thinking about myself, not worrying about what kind of a burden I’m going to be on Sara. This is smart, and is probably what I should do, but it’s so hard for me to do that when I have this incredibly powerful urge to just focus all my energy on making everything good for Sara. (Why is that such a powerful urge? Oh my god, for many reasons, all of which are valid and many of which are perfectly healthy, but none of which I’m going to go into right now.)

My friend said that I should want to get pampered from Sara for a little while, have her take care of me, be treated to thoughtfulness and compassion and empathy, and that I should let go of all these stresses I keep taking upon myself like worrying about whether or not I’m going to be happy enough for her so she has a good time. Again, this is smart and makes sense; I can’t possibly have a good time or expect Sara to have a good time with me (which is what I want more than anything in the world right now) if I’m going to be obsessing about the question all the time. But I’m really scared.

I’m scared not only about this weekend but the future as well. What’s going to happen if Sara gets accepted to a school far away? Besides the point of fact that means she’ll be leaving New York, it makes me feel like another knife of how differently priveledged Sara and I are is once again thrust into my heart–not by Sara, just by the situation. I would feel much, much, much better about the whole situation where she feels like she wants to go to graduate school for creative writing if I could understand what the real driving force behind that motivation is. I have to know that if she leaves me for school (I evidently have major, major abandonment issues–not surprising considering my childhood with divorced parents and whatnot), she’s doing it for a reason that’s near and dear to her heart.

Not that I think she’d ever do something so big as moving to Australia for graduate school for any other reason than one that’s near and dear to her heart, but it will be easier to take if I can at least understand–not necessarily agree with–her choice of action and why that specific action of going to a graduate school is the right one for her to make, versus something like getting a full-time job and actually getting into the mindset of writing professionally–not just learning about writing–as I know she can do brilliantly. It comes back to the feeling of resentment (and I feel more guilt for having this feeling of resentment in the first place than I ever thought I would ever feel guilty about anything ever (especially since I constantly tell Sara that guilt is not a useful thing to dwell on–we both have our guilt complexes, me from this, and her from being more priviledged in life than I have ever been)) over my being forced by the Fates to fight a hellish battle for every scrap of happiness and capability to follow my dreams that I can get, whereas Sara has the good fortune to prolong her schooling–something she enjoys–and put off the dreadful experience of having a so-called “real” job (it is viscerally disgusting to me that a “real” job is always seen as something you don’t want) and putting up with the rest of the crap of living in the so-called “real” world (again, I want to vomit thinking that the “real” world is so full of strife all the time) for yet another four years (or more, if she goes for a Ph.D. in Writing in Australia).

(As a sidenote, holy shit, that was an insanely convoluted parenthetical paragraph. Also, I don’t actually wish for her to get a job she hates, of course. I would hardly wish this hell on my worst enemy.)

Again, it’s not that I think Sara doesn’t have her own stuff to deal with. But there is simply no arguing the fact that on many scales of measurable priveledge, she got dealt the better hand. She is brilliant, a constant inspiration to me. And she is so amazingly healthy. No other person I have ever met or ever heard of in my entire life, without exaggeration, is so glowing with the unmistakable aura of a uniquely qualified intelligent mind such as hers is and has not gone through a great deal of very measurable pain and suffering as the source for their genius, the likes of which is obvious to everyone who hears about their suffering. That is the case with me. I am very, very smart. I match Sara’s awesome strengths in many ways, such as self-awareness and intelligence, kindness, and skills in our respective interests. But I have so many still-open scars that have gotten me to this point. Her body is enviously relatively unscathed by the harsh realities of life.

I don’t want this whole thing to sound like a self-pity party–because that’s not what this is supposed to be, but I can’t not feel this way right now. I’m working on it, god, I’m really working on it as hard as I can because I don’t want Sara to have to deal with this huge amount of utter shit that’s in me. I miss smiling. I miss being happy enough to just listen to music and hum to myself. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

And of course, I miss Sara. My god, I miss Sara most of all.

Sara just called! Right as I was publishing this entry, Sara called. She had heard my rambling, crying message I left for her and called me back saying that she was sorry for saying that she’d call me this morning because she was thinking in California time, and I’m on New York time, so when she meant morning she meant California’s morning. (D’oh!)

However, also bad news is that because of the airline delays it is looking like she may not be able to get to Maine until 10 AM Saturday morning, which absolutely changes our weekend plans…. I don’t know what else to do about this weekend, my job, or anything right now, except to go through the motions as normal and so I’m just going to wait things out until I can see her and talk to her face to face and actually hold her in my arms again.