The Despondency Experiment

Remember the gummy bears. ;)

            Okay, I’m just going to come out and say it. My life is awesome, especially when I’m here at home. I don’t have any sort of impending deadlines for school assignments or social dilemmas to sort through. All relaxation, no stress. Except that’s the problem. My problem is that I have NO PROBLEMS. I feel like bursting into a chorus of “It’s Too Heavenly Here,” like Charlie from All Dogs Go to Heaven 2. Basically, I’m going insane…I mean, I actually watched All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, if that’s any indication.

Even when I’m at school, though, I feel like I live a charmed life. Nothing ever goes wrong for me. Ever. I always get the classes I want exactly when I want to take them. No matter how short my attention span, my teachers always love me. I get straight A’s, and everything is easy. Let’s face it. I’m good at school. And life. I’m so good, in fact, that I feel the need to procrastinate absolutely all responsibilities until the last possible second. For dramatic effect, of course. One time, I forgot to take my Advanced Writing final online before it closed. I e-mailed my professor in a panic, and he told me not to worry about it and that he’d send me the link to the final right away. Why? Because I ate gummy bears for breakfast in his class every morning, and I shared them with him. “I remember the gummy bears,” he wrote in his return e-mail, and he even included a picture of the world’s largest gummy bear, for my entertainment. That is solid proof that gummy bears for breakfast everyday can save your life.

Anyway, back to the problem. When life is too easy, where’s the fun in that? No one wants to read a story about someone with a perfect life. Good stories are about trouble, which is why I feel an obligation to the future readers of my best-selling autobiography to occasionally shake things up a bit. I thought long and hard about this, and I said to myself “Hm…I wonder what sad feels like?” So, I resolved to pretend to be depressed for a few days, just to see if I could pull it off. I planned to spend my days wallowing in self-pity, listening to whiny emo music, sighing and looking out windows at the dark, cruel world beyond, and generally playing the part of the poor, unfortunate soul in a sad, sad movie. That’s right, if the sun shines wrong, I would be the first to complain. Except, I found out that being sad is not all it’s cracked up to be. Actually, it’s kind of a downer. If you’re going to try out an emotion just for the heck of it, don’t pick depression. Why? Because it will suck you in like a black hole, that’s why. The second you start to feel sorry for yourself because you spilled scalding hot coffee on your left hand at work and now your skin is starting to fall off, making you look like you have leprosy, life will give you infinitely more reasons to feel less than awesome. So, I decided that I like having very little to worry about, and I’ll save the tempests and rainclouds for the characters in my future best-selling novels.  

Through this experiment, I realized that self-pity is a sentiment that I am simply not capable of. Who am I kidding? I was born to be a shiny, happy person. People ask me how I can be happy all the time. Here’s how. No matter what life throws at me, I only allow myself seven minutes of sadness, and then I laugh it off, make fun of my problems. Because life is too short to be depressed. I lied before. My life isn’t perfect, but I love it anyway. J