Okay so lets talk emotions for a second... We all experience them, after all they are what make life, well, life right? They affect everything we do day in and day out, emotions define a person, their friends, their success, and their quality of life.
All of us have had that moment when your rollin' down the highway, windows rolled down and music loud just feeling great - maybe your on your way back from work on a Friday excited for the weekend and happy you finally have some free time. Then your changing lanes all the sudden and miss someone in your blind spot, they honk, you get startled and proceed to turn the music down, roll the windows up, and slow down. Now your embarrassed - but only for a brief second - and the embarrassment is gone and its all good.
We've all also had that more-than-a-moment emotion of being in the slums, and although we wish it would behave the same way as the highway-embarrassment-moment it doesn't. Maybe it lasts for days, weeks or even months, and as much as you want it to disappear like that moment of embarrassment it just wont go away. Psychologists have made a living out of studying this feeling, studying the brain and seratonin levels, and coming to the conclusion that clinical depression is the cause. There is that scary word again, "depression" the word that carries with it one of the most common stereotypes in our society and the word that scares the shit out of all of us. After all nobody wants to be "depressed," the same way that nobody wants to be poor; nobody wants to be that minority, I mean especially when it seems like its something thats self inflicted. Your parents didn't bear a depressed child from their womb, so it must be your fault that your feeling this way; you must be accountable, its on your shoulders and you made the decision to feel this way.
But when you look at depression and the statistics the fact is that its hardly a minority, at least when it comes evidence. More people in the US suffer from depression than cancer, heart disease and AIDS combined! Myself and many others embrace this stereotype as bull shit, a clinical diagnosis that warrants Prozac and other SSRIs - making the doctor, and pharmaceutical companies money. After all depression defined by the dictionary is "A state of being depressed." Isn't everyone sad at some point? Isn't sadness an emotion that everyone experiences at some point in their lives? Sadness is one of the only emotions an infant can feel and recognize coming out of the womb, but still as hard as you may try nobody can shake completely throughout their life.
Knowing this I propose melancholy is what we actually feel. The word "Melancholy" carries with it an even more confusing and less known meaning. A child doesn't feel melancholy. Whenever I think of this word, I always think of "Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness" the last album by the Smashing Pumpkins before they broke up that produced many of their most recognizable songs. Notice though that Melancholy exists as a separate entity from the "Infinite Sadness" If they were the same thing wouldn't the album just have been called "Infinite Sadness" or "Melancholy." Who knows, but when I think of Melancholy and how it makes us and everyone else feel there is no psychological explanation. Why did God give us this emotion, what does to help us do... Why does this feeling exist? Frustrated thinking as one seeks to answer this question only yields the conclusion that we don't know and will never know. But after all, maybe its better that way - because without "Melancholy" and "The Infinite Sadness" we wouldn't know what happiness feels like, and without happiness where we would any of us be?
