Every human.

Lowry Achieng
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

We live life dashing through one moment, to the next one. Wanting things that forever elude us. We sulk at our very primal states of melancholy. We admire the very things that we think we lack and so in the pursuit of happiness are constantly in the race to achieve some joy-inducing goal. Happiness is to be wanted, they say, but is it really?

I bask in my melancholies, loving and embracing the sadness as a part of my humanness. I treat sadness like a third arm I was born with and tend to it as a mother would her new born baby. Most people don’t understand and I stopped trying to make them. So why do I love depressive things when I spend most of my waking hours battling against depression in one way or another?

I could say that I don’t know and that would absolve me of my responsibility to think or explain my thoughts. I do know.

Most people, you see, look at me and say that I am happy and worriless, that I live my life absolutely free of external conditioning, that I am a healer of sorts because of how I express my empathy and to some extent I am. Recently I went on a self-discovery tour so I asked my best friends one question: What do you love about me?

One of them said “I love that you are gracefully and unapologetically you.”

Another said, “I love that you are very authentic in your tastes. You like what you like and you do it in such a unique way that it cannot be copied by someone else.”

The third friend said, “I love your thought processes, it aligns with my own thoughts. I also love that you know how to express your thoughts.”

That was quite a discovery. I hadn’t realized before that my friends could see that in me.

Forgive my roaming thoughts, I write today after a very long time. Hopefully you’ll see my point by the end of this article.

I believe that happiness can be chosen and although that is not always the case because of mental illness, a ‘normal’ person can choose happiness. Happiness does not always show up when it’s expected to. It is a stubborn friend like that but the real key to happiness is to relinquish one’s ego. The ego is an insatiable monster, it demands and demands and. Girl, don’t get me started on the ego.

Sadness on the other hand cannot be helped. We loathe and work very hard at eluding it but sadness gets into our heads forcefully and wrenches our hearts and we cannot do anything about it. I cling onto my melancholic states because I believe that sadness returns us to our most human nature. To be human for me is to be vulnerable, to be an animal again, to lose all mind and control of one’s situation and sadness is the one emotion that makes us human again.

Humans are crazy but they live all their lives keeping it together. Our minds are complex with deep desires and dark fantasies and dislikes and likes and worries and past experiences and so on. To seem normal, we keep it together by withholding our real thoughts so as to protect others from the craziness. Sadness, I believe, shatters all walls of self-control and turns us into babies with needs and desires and most of all, vulnerabilities.

If you ask me, happiness is overrated but if you must find it, look within.

And if you can’t find it, remember to embrace your humanness.

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