sadness and depression

I've been a little sad lately—but not so depressed.  That's good: for a while there I think I was depressed and not sad.

The distinction may be arbitrary,* but it's not like I invented it; it's just not universal.  (Q.v. Melanie Klein's distinction between envy and jealousy, which I think is great but which you can't assume other people will get if you just use the words without extensive footnotes: as I understand it, Klein defines jealousy as the experience of wishing you had something someone else has and envy as the experience of not wanting the other person to get to have it at all.**)  I'm going to put this as simply as I can: sadness is an emotion, a feeling, and is something we all inevitably experience as human beings, whereas depression is more a condition or a state of mind, not a more severe sadness but almost a failure to be sad.  Both can be incapacitating, but you might liken sadness to the healing process or its unpleasant side effects*** and depression to something more like an immunodeficiency virus.  This idea may be particularly foreign to us because we live in a society that places maybe too much of a premium on happiness.  It's worth noting that happiness refers (originally) not to an emotion but to the possession of hap or haps, which basically means luck and which we also see in the words perhaps and mishap; when we value happiness above all else, we are effectively blurring the concepts of feelings and fortune.  Can we be "happy" if things are not going exactly as we would hope?  Don't most of us believe—don't most religions teach—that there's more to life than things going well?  It's important, vitally important (remember that vitally is not just an intensifier: I'm talking about what we need to live), that we be able to live through unhappiness—meaning both misfortune and grief.

I'm not really saying anything new or revolutionary, here, but I do think that we in our culture have trouble feeling our feelings.  (Gross sentimentalism only proves my point.)  We think our feelings can be judged, controlled.  For this I blame religion and the notion that God monitors our thoughts and desires: we are held responsible not only for our behavior, but also for our most secret impulses and emotions.  Jimmy Carter committed adultery in his heart—was that the line?  I'm not going to say that the idea is meaningless or crazy—what we think and feel does matter, does have weight—but I'm afraid that we become hypervigilant and try to deny what cannot be denied, try to escape judgement by burying the crime.  That is not the solution.  The crime is not a crime.  Feelings are never wrong: we may choose not to act upon them, may wish we did not feel them, may even question our characters because of them—and it's certainly fair to note that we have contradictory feelings, such that sometimes it's hard to call any one feeling "realer" than the others—but one thing is true of any feeling, and it is that you feel it—and that, it would be absurd to deny.  I submit that feelings take place outside of the jurisdiction of morality: only action opens you up to divine prosecution.****

Point being simply that it's OK to be sad, to be bummed.  In fact, it's healthy.  In fact, a life without pain is not a life at all.  What is scary is when we shut down, when we stop feeling, when we retreat from reality so as to avoid pain, to avoid life—because when we do that, we are dead alive.  I've had times in my life when I've felt like I was doing OK and people have said I looked sad; lately, it's tended to be the other way around, that I'm feeling sort of bummed and people say it looks like I'm doing well.  And you know what?  I think maybe I am doing well.  A little sadness never did anyone any harm.

Anyway, I've been listening to a lot of Radiohead.

* Is there a word for a distinction that you're making rather than a distinction to which you're referring?  Word : neologism :: distinction : ?  Oh, right—the word is still distinction: it can mean either a distinguishing factor or the act of distinguishing, sort of like the difference between construction meant as the process of constructing something and construction meant as the finished product.  (Funny that the noun building is used pretty much exclusively to refer to something that is done being built.  I mean, it's not hilarious or anything).

** Klein goes an interesting step further by asserting that we wish to destroy the things we envy, and then a hilarious step further (as Freud and his followers frequently did^a) by asserting that the way in which we wish to destroy these things is...by filling them with shit.

*** Aren't the symptoms of most illnesses in fact caused by your immune system's response and not by the bacteria or virus itself?

**** Of course, I believe the ancient Greeks' definition of action included action of the mind...

^a The example I love in Freud is that he claimed that boredom is almost always expressive not of nothing to do but rather of something we can't admit to ourselves that we want to do [brilliant], and then claimed that what we want to do is to masturbate [hilarious].