emotions

I have at various times been told that I am, in one sense or another, an unemotional person, or that I am disconnected from my emotions. This may be true

Earlier this fall, I was very, very unhappy. This was a persistent bad mood that lasted for at least a few months. Basically I was distressed about possible future events, and this set my baseline mood to "unhappy." It was not a lot of fun.

One day, after work, I walked outside, and it was snowing. And I suddenly became really, really happy - winter is my favorite season, after all. It was simply beautiful walking home in the snow. And I haven't been unhappy since. This is rather odd. Nothing changed about the future, after all - and yet I am happy.

This suggests to me that my moods (shall we call them) are not entirely responsive to reasons, or at least good reasons. A snowfall should not, rationalistically speaking, be the sort of thing to clear up anxiety.

Or maybe it should. Maybe it is a good reminder, for me at least, that the world is a beautiful place. And maybe I had forgotten about that - and maybe forgetting that is what my depression was all about. It's odd.

in other news:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/magazine/14bipolar-t.html
"The Bipolar Puzzle"
by Jennifer Egan
September 12, 2008
The New York Times

"“My feelings weren’t really going that well,” Phia [a nine year old with bipolar disorder] told me when I asked her about the previous weekend. “It was like all of a sudden, horribleish. Unexplainable mad, sad horrible feelings inside.” She blamed the several days of standardized tests she recently took at school, saying they made her anxious."

It's interesting that when she is young, Phia can see that her feelings aren't really prompted by the events around her, in a way - that they're not caused by what they purport to be about. For my part, realizing that a snowfall was enough to make me happy makes me wonder whether I was ever really upset by the future, or whether that's just what my bad mood fixated on after the fact.