Maggie's Farm

The happiest I've ever been in my life was senior year in college studying for finals. I took a black beauty and read my entire Western Civ. book including footnotes, page numbers, end notes, and the bios of the authors of the book. I was so damn happy I couldn't understand why everyone in the world wasn't doing what I was doing. I dropped my pen and scrounged under the bed for it and cleaned all the dust from under there and felt great about it. Seventy-two hours after I aced the exam, my parents arrived for graduation. The first words out of my mother's mouth were, "What is wrong with your eyes?" I hadn't blinked in three days.

I think there is a difference between joy and happiness. Happiness is random and circumstantial, and much of it depends on your temperament. Joy comes from within, from something you have done that produces and answers the recondite need to feel good about yourself and to have another note that goodness. I wrote a book once and my superintendent asked me to stop teaching for a year to travel the state to present the book. It was about teaching. I was invited to Chicago to present it to the annual convention of five-thousand social studies teachers. I was invited to present it to the annual VEA convention where I received a standing ovation. I was invited to an Arab/Israeli school in Israel to teach it and the to the Women's Conference in Bejiing. My feet didn't touch the ground for a long time, and I truly cannot describe the feeling of joy that filled me. Then I began to have weird feelings of paranoia as if there was something I was missing. The accolades and approbation kept on but my smile started getting kind of quivery for some reason. My mind was sending out the warning that joy does not last. It doesn't. It was like the 'black' beauty in a way... you can't sustain extreme emotions.

I don't believe we are wicked by nature. People who believe that fear themselves.

I think self-imposed guilt is a good thing. But when one imposes it on another, it is wrong. A child may forget the offense, but he will never forget how you made him feel. I believe it is a sin to shame someone. It is too painful.

Make your own happiness. If you are capable of original thought it's not difficult. Or if you have a dog.
`

Thank you, Buddy and Dr. X. I reread it and realize I left out what made me respond in the first place - not that I didn't want to talk about happiness. But it's that guilt is not a virtue. It is the action one takes to assuage the guilt that 'may' be virtuous or not. Wallowing in guilt is repulsive. It is for the weak, I think, who simper and sigh in guilt's embrace. "I'm sorry." is magic stuff. So is calling your dad when you know he's only going to complain and ask why you haven't called. :(

Thank you.
`

Teqjack. That's a sad story. You described well the best one can expect from the plethora of antidepressants on the market. The 'steady-state' is perfect. The psychologist sounds like a psychiatrist-wannabe. He had to act as if he knew better than they when he used the 'drug-dependency' line. That's horrible. It transfers the problem onto you while he attempts a 'superior' role in your events. No wonder you left. Sounds to me as if he needs a good therapist.

I know several friends with the same kind of clinical depression. One tried Ritalin and it changed his life over night. He's funny and says, "I don't know how to act!" Big grin..

I hope you can find someone and get some relief. That was definitely a bad experience if you ask me. Like, the last thing you needed to hear.

Meta
`

And that circle remains broken, KRW. Have you ever watched war stories where veterans of WWII are featured? Did you watch the celebration of the opening of the WWII Memorial in DC? All these old guys in their uniforms showed up .. in wheelchairs, using walkers, canes; and during the ceremony the cameras kept showing their faces and the tears flowing down the wrinkles of their hallowed countenances. Same with the war stories shows. At some point when the vets are talking, the tears flow. There was no science to help these guys so they just went to work and did what they had to do - many living lives of quiet misery. The Vietnam vets with PTSD get a little more attention but they have to fight for it. In Iraq, they're trying to stop PTSD before it starts so these guys can function before the 'quiet' starts. That's just the vets. In the general population, life can be a war zone, too.

Kinda shortsighted to refer to the 'edge' as romantic. What makes the mind immune to injury? I know.... the liver disease one gets trying to quiet the fires of it.
`

KRW,

Good thought: "It makes me wonder if, in the aggregate they may have been better off without the "science"."

There is a lot to be said for denial in that it can allow one to function. PTSD is so tough because there is no magical cure and when the denial falters, all hell can break loose. I think that's why the WWII vets affect me so deeply.... they came home to expectations of being regular guys and some of them didn't recognize 'regular' anymore. Sheesh.. Too sad.

Buddy gave Luther and me a book to read about the fighting in the Pacific theater. "Goodbye Darkness" by William Manchester. I moved it onto my Top Ten List - where, oddly when I looked at it again, I noted five of the books are war books. (Real war..) It will change your life in that penetrating way visiting the cemetary at Normandy will. You can comprehend both intellectually, but there are no words to touch the emotional awe of any man who has gone to war. ( I used 'awe' in its true meaning.)
`

Wow. That made me sad, KRW. I think your dad did dream. It's just that his brain short-circuited the recall of the dreams. His brain was working 'for' him at the time, and so was his training. One of the first realized symptoms of PTSD is dreaming and reliving events of the trauma. (I use PTSD and trauma here lightly, but there can be little doubt war is trauma.) I also use 'realized' to mean one of the overt symptoms as many of the other symptoms are more covert. Maybe his tumor and impending death reawakened his former, war time fears of death and that awakened his dreams. The part that makes me sad is wondering if he wanted to talk about the dreams, or if it worried him that not dreaming was a sign of something bad which he could not articulate and wanted to make sure his son was able to dream. I think it's great that you have his letters at least, and of course the memories of how he coped when he got home. My dad was in the Aleutians where some of the worst fighting was. He has never said a word about it. He is quiet by nature, and I wonder if he would speak of it now. I wonder more if I could bear to listen as I have such deep, pervading emotion about my father as it is, that I might not be able to handle it if the stories are sad. (Since I was little I've felt a helpless, relentless need to 'fix' some assumed and unknowable sadness in him..... odd, too, as he was so successful in his military career and retirement joy of raising the best camellias on the east coast on the plantation where he grew up.) I didn't dream until I was 24, and it was a nightmare that left me paralyzed for half an hour. What few dreams I have now, whatever people are in them have no faces.

I have written down "Fly Boys' and will read it. And I'll tell Buddy, too. He may have already read it. He will not read "Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara, though, and I'm not going to let him come visit me where I live in the midst of all the great battlefields of the Civil War. I owe him for "Goodbye Darkness", though. One more if you are interested in WWI is "A Soldier of the Great War" by Mark Halperin. shew! That's in my Top Ten.

One last thing..... Thank you for telling me about your dad. I have put off going to visit my dad for a while, and you shook me up about that. I needed it.
`