Happiness Is A Fish I Cannot Catch
The burning question: Will I ever be truly happy?
I am unlike the majority of people in the sense that I feel too much. Is it a crime to feel so much? No--and yet it sentences me to a lifelong imprisonment in melancholia... the ever-present atmosphere of sweet regret. And I don't know that the prospect of this necessarily frightens me. Others may never wish to be unhappy, and I will admit that sadness is something that has plagued me... but I have to wonder: what would be left of me if I was stripped of this depth of feeling?
I could never settle for the pedestrian vision and a normal life. I find the taste of the mundane and the ordinary to be stale and unsettling. The highs and lows of my emotional life do open up an intensified level of existence that is beyond ordinary happiness--a level far richer than that for which other people seem to be willing to settle. I have this sense of being an alien outsider to ordinary reality, of being unique and strangely different, of being an actor who is moving through the scense of my own life... and to give up the suffereing of this heightened emotional life, the prospect of becoming simply happy, almost threatens to close the door to the intense emotional world. I would probably choose depth of feeling over mere happiness, if I had the option, because I have an affinity for what is real and what is intense in life. The constant state of melancholia cannot be lost for it casts the ordinary events into the dimensions of the aesthetic. My desires and yearnings become a search and a journey, and my depression is transformed into a poetic appreciation for the human condition. The inner tension that these feelings bring to surface is essential to my creativity. There must be an outlet for these feelings, because they are too intense to bury and suppress... they are released through creative expressions such as music, poetry, art, etc.
Since I feel more deeply than others do, I'm often bound to a tragic existence.

But if this is the price for a life that differs from the common, tasteless lives others are subjected to, I will gratefully accept the tears.