We talk about unhappiness with our colleagues, our friends, our neighbors, or that stranger we met on the Internet but our bookstores and libraries are filled with books on happiness. We pick them up as a cure for our unhappiness, but how can we cure something that we do not understand?
Are we really looking to escape the state of “unhappiness” or are we looking to see it better — maybe with someone who sees our shade of unhappiness and says “Hey I like this shade, I have a similar one but two shades lighter”
As much as it is impossible to describe “happiness”, it is equally difficult to put a definition around what “unhappiness” looks like. Maybe it is a novice bartender’s concoction of a cocktail with unequal and haphazard measures of anger, grief, frustrations, self-hatred garnished with a thin slice of fresh delusion. What makes this cocktail unique is that its taste depends on your mouth. It might be bitter to me, bittersweet to you, and unpalatable to someone else. Just like happiness.
In the quest for happiness, I have grown a tad bit closer to its shadow. What makes me unhappy and what makes me happy are the two sides of the same coin. Most of the time I have the wrong coin that I toss in the air expecting a favorable outcome. It was never about the outcome, I had the wrong coin all this while.
If I have to put a finger on how my unhappiness looks and feels like, my finger will get a frostbite. The anger that is deflected onto the world reflects back at me, the frustrations of missed opportunities and countless failures have formed a thin layer of icicle on my back that never melts, the inner monologue of self-hatred and belittling cast as dark rainclouds that can burst anytime, the delusion circles over me as the snowy sky not letting the orange rays of the sun reach the icicle on my back. My unhappiness looks and feels like a blizzard in a beautiful skiing town in the Alps. Of course, my fingers get frostbite trying to locate it.
Can we all describe our unhappiness the way we would describe a gourmet meal at a fancy restaurant that we do not really know but try to review anyway? And then toss the description in a recycle bin with the hope that happiness comes out of it?
But again, please remember both are the sides of the same coin, we do not know which is which and we have the wrong coin.
Unhappiness, you win!
