I’m still in a sad, reflective mood. Its been harder to get over AnnE than I first hoped. We've still not spoken and she’s acting like nothing happened. I’m more upset now with myself for getting her so wrong.
There was an interesting, timely article on New Scientist this week that asked the question is it really bad to be sad? (it’s here, but I think you might need subscription, and seems to be based on this book). I’ve had a fairly sad few weeks, and I agreed with the guy that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. He suggests that people (not me, I hastily point out) are too quickly turning to antidepressants as a quick fix for a bout of sadness, and that in doing so we are depriving ourselves a valuable period of reflection;
"They fear that the increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with a crucial part of our biology. Sadness, they argue, serves an evolutionary purpose - and if we lose it, we lose out."
But where do you draw the line? When does your sadness reach a level that is dangerous? Who decides? How do they decide? I guess it’s a question I could ask DPsyc about if he wasn’t going to bore my tits off with his answer.
I have, like last time, turned to music and running – my ankle, thank fuck, has been feeling slowly better and I'm going to try my 13 mile coast run this weekend. I’ve got a new Camelbak to try out and a new 2 Gb Shuffle, which seems to have a never ending stream of songs compared to my previous 256 Mb mp3 player. It’s nice to have some new songs to run to after 4 years of the same 40 or so, but I’ve kept most of the originals on the playlist as they’re absolute killers. I find it interesting how a change in mood can make you find different meaning in a song lyric – I've noticed a lot more songs that I like are obviously written after getting dumped, or through a break up, and have lines in them that id previously not understood, or just didnt hear.
Or maybe you just interpret things how you want to.
Who knows.
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6 comments:
It's true, sadness seems to serve an important purpose. I just wish the reflection it brings could occur without the negative emotions. A run sounds like a good idea.
I can just imagine the tension with you guys living in the same place but not speaking. Frankly, I don't get her. Is the silence mutual or is one initiating it?
I'm tempted to administer the usual verbal slap I hand out to you in these situations (no woman, certainly not this woman, is worth such levels of misery), but I've had a dose of the January blues too so I'm more inclined to sympathise this time (mine aren't anywhere near as specific, though I think it's rooted in needing a change of job...)
I read an article a while back that said something similar to what you've quoted. I think the gist was that because we've got technology to ease our lives, we're finding all these new "illnesses" like various forms of depression which are actually just sadness. Back in the day, if folk got sad because the harvest had failed, then they didn't go to a shrink. They would just die.
I agree totally about this desperation to treat sadness as some kind of disease that must be urgently treated lest it become contagious or something.
I'm going to disagree with Ant on the worthiness of women in relation to misery.
If you don't feel the misery of something broken, you have to question whether or not it had any real value to you in the first place.
It is better to have loved and lost, and all that.
Yeah ok fair enough, "no woman" is too much of a generalisation.
But I think lack of misery should be the prescription for this woman - she sounds like a bit of a game-playing bi-atch to me. SMARTb is definitely worthy of much better treatment.
Fortunately, you have not only one, but two psych grad students commenting on this one to bore you with their answers...
(not to suggest that Psychgrad's answer is boring... just that mine might be)
I actually had a discussion with a friend about this recently, in talking about our society's obsession with quick fixes vs. real work-- antidepressants vs. therapy or even just working through things. The truth is, we are often depressed for a very real reason-- something in our life does need to change. Taking a pill isn't going to change that. Paying attention to where that depression is coming from is a better shot, in my books.
THanks for your thoughts - i didnt mean to imply that i thought your answers would be boring, far from it. I looked forward to hearing them. I feel back to normal now, whatever that is, and have been back to the more usual drinking, laughing and fancy dress partying antics i try to fill this time with... (see next post!)
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