Hrmf.

[ladysprite]

Everything is going so well.

I have enough work, I have enough money, I have someone who loves me, I have friends who care about me, I have at least some usefulness so I don't feel like a social sponge.

So why do I still feel the overwhelming, all-consuming urge to hide under the blankets and not come out until there's snow on the ground and the world has forgotten me?

Comments

[braider.livejournal.com]

Because you have a complex telling you to be miserable, and since you're not it's causing you to be dead certain that there's something wrong. You don't feel that you deserve to be happy, so your subconscience is doing its best to make the world the way it should be.

[tpau]

because being happy is a scary prospect. i am not being fasetious either, that is why _i_ feel liek that. admiting that life is good is a very very hard thing...

[wren13.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just Pennsic brain? Or you are waiting for the other shoe to drop (my besetting sin, too)?

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

I'd go with some pre-Pennsic paranoia. It may not be all of the issue, but with Pennsic you are doing:
- something that everyone raves about - will it be as fun as they say?
- something that is a ton of work to prep for - will it be worth the work?
- something that everyone has advice for you on - which advice to take?
- something that almost everyone has a "bad story" about - a fight, a breakup, a trip to the hospital, etc, etc. - so... why was it we called this fun again?

All that excitement/tension can really get to a person. Things to remember:
- you have enough money to go to a movie if it's too hot, or a hotel if you just can't take camping anymore.
- you are with friends who can help with the unforseen calamities. Among us, we probably have a pretty good range of calamity management skills.
- you don't have to like it - you can hate it and never go again, heck, I bet you can even hate it, and go home early, and do something fun and touristy with your time on the way back.

Knowing that with a credit card, almost anything is possible, takes a lot of stress away from my pre-Pennsic jitters. Yeah, I still get jitters. Not as big as the first year, but I do have nerves about various aspects of Pennsic.

[lensman.livejournal.com]

So why do I still feel the overwhelming, all-consuming urge to hide under the blankets and not come out until there's snow on the ground and the world has forgotten me?

Hey wait that sounds like Arisia... :-)

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's the heat? :-)

[sebastian-tombs.livejournal.com]

Well, considering all of your friends, why do you think that the world will forget you simply by hiding until Winter? You're more likely to end up with company than to be forgotten!

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Love, emotional energy is energy of a sort, and sometimes it builds up or gets out of balance.

Sometimes, yes, sometimes, it's a matter of something to be thought about. Sometimes it's "I have this issue, and now that I'm thinking about it, with respect to that issue, I can think about ways to change things so they're more to my liking.

But sometimes it's the energy itself boiling up and making noise and causing problems, and learning to re-balance it helps.

(Keeping in mind that *everyone's* experience is different, I have a better experience from trying to draw in good to flush out the bad; I have a much worse experience simply trying to let the bad drain out.)

Herm. An Irish shaman I know lectures about the cup and the river. The cup is *your energy*, and you never use it for anything except yourself. The river is the energy all around us, that anyone can tap into. Something that just came into my mind is that when the water in the cup is too stagnant, it's not healthy, and letting the river flow into it, until it's full up and overflowing, lets the movement of the water clean everything out.

But, under the covers and avoiding people for a time, or out and about and making the world happier, you are still loved and cherished.

[tafkad.livejournal.com]

[Trying this again, because technical difficulties ate a good chunk of the original text.]

Oscar Wilde said (I believe it was in Dorian Gray), that there is no such thing as happiness. There is only pleasure or the lack thereof.

Gray was full of it, of course.

The situation you describe is not one that would induce happiness; rather, it would normally induce contentment. Unfortunately, we're a nation of intensity junkies, unable to handle the prospect of calm feelings being real. If we're not happyhappyHAPPY all the damned time, then everyone assumes we're sad or angry. If it's not a smile, it must be a frown. They'd have you forget the fact that most of us simply have "relaxed" faces, if you will, arguing that if the corners aren't turned up, they must be turned down. That way lies self-torture.

There is a play called The King of Hearts. In it, one woman becomes enraged anytime someone says that something about her is nice. She wants it to be marvelous, and she won't settle for less. By the end of it, someone comments that the evening is nice. As she begins her usual tirade, she suddenly realizes that she's had her share of marvelous all day long. She's had her intense feeling. She can handle the rest of the day being nice.

Perhaps you're trying to figure out why you're not happy at a time when contentment is chugging along nicely, so you've convinced yourself that you're unhappy. Many times for me, the real happiness has come along when I have a chance to breathe deeply and enjoy the contentment.

So maybe if you stop looking for the bluebird of happiness, you'll find it right next to the canary of contentment; otherwise, the birdsong you'll hear is the, um, magpie of misery?

I hope this helps. If that doesn't, then I hope this will: During the past few weeks, you have been a wonderful help to me, both physically and emotionally. Perhaps that can help you enjoy a little well-earned contentment.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

You spent a good chunk of your early life internalizing the ideas that you were insignificant and that life was always going to suck. You've lived with that paradigm long enough that, like the sewer worker, the stench has gotten good to you -- it's a comfortable and familiar place to be. Now you're being pushed out of it (largely by reaping the fruits of your own labor), and it's scary... in the same way that being born is scary. You want to crawl back into that familiar dark space and hide. This is a fairly common phenomenon, and the best cure for it is to continue living the life you have now until the idea of being well-loved and happy gets as familiar and un-scary to you as the old ones were.