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Do You Suffer From This Disorder?
The pursuit of unhappiness, especially your own. Please kindly don’t show up at my house. But wait, there’s more.
During some research for another article, I came across a bit of intriguing information about a rather little-known psychiatric disorder that might explain some of what I’m seeing on Medium and elsewhere.
The disorder is called Cherophobia, which is when a person has an irrational aversion to being happy.
From this website:
The term comes from the Greek word “chero,” which means “to rejoice.” When a person experiences cherophobia, they’re often afraid to participate in activities that many would characterize as fun, or of being happy.
Based on many of the titles I see, some of the articles I start and promptly dump, it seems that not only should this be formally classified but it also seems to be spreading fast.
While it’s true that misery loves company, the tendency is to want to drag others down with you. That probably deserves its own psychiatric definition.
I don’t wanna be happy and I sure as hell don’t want YOU to be happy either.
While that doesn’t fall into the definition, it sure can feel like it sometimes.
A friend once called me a “jubilant person.” I love that. Doesn’t mean I’m happy dappy all the time, nor does it mean that I am irrationally happy. Irrational at times, sure. But my default setting is joyful, if for no other reason than that so far, there have been plenty of close scrapes with imminent death, and far too many close calls with wanting to end it myself.
What time I have left, the hours and days and weeks and years left to me are pretty precious. I like doing things which deepen the crevasses of my smile lines.
We seem to believe in my birth country that we have a right to happiness, or at least the the pursuit of it, since some slave-owning wags put those words into our incorporating paperwork, if you will.
We did a damned good job of making others righteously miserable on the path to make ourselves happy at other’s expense. We cost them their land, livelihood, lives and…
