I conducted an experiment recently using the age-old question: “Is this glass half full or half empty?” Most people promptly opted for half full going on to describe their sunny outlook and positivity. Much the expected result given my use of a somewhat hackneyed question to which everyone thinks they know ‘the answer’. However, I posed the same question to certain friends whom I knew had suffered or were suffering still from melancholia. This time I asked them to describe the glass as they would have seen it when at their very lowest.
“Glass? I wouldn’t have the strength to look at it far less describe it.” said one.
“It’s a glass of water. Get over it.” said another. It seems that melancholics are too preoccupied to comment on hypothetical situations. What was surprising is that absolutely no one opted for half empty. Not a single person wanted to be known as a pessimist. A bleak outlook has become unfashionable. Or has it? Spend enough time socialising in any ordinary crowd and you will eventually meet those who wear irony like a t-shirt; the complainers; those for whom the best days are over and the future is a toilsome burden. In their day the glass was much bigger and the water was beer. They are the pseudo-melancholic. Once known as romantics they became the New Romantics and as they got older they got grumpy TV shows and their grandchildren became Emos. They are everywhere.
Shakespeare managed to avoid listening to Radiohead or The Manic Street Preachers but he seemed to have met one of their most ardent fans:
“Away from light steals home my heavy son/ and private in his chamber pens himself/ shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,/ and makes himself an artificial night.” (Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 1) Romeo in his melancholy adds clouds to his misery. Any parent will recognise the jilted teenager, barricaded in his room, refusing to eat, surviving on a diet of tears and music that reeks of loss.
Every age has their pop songs that celebrate sadness; The Great Pretender; I’m a Loser by the Beatles; What Do I Do Now? By Sleeper in the 90s and nowadays Pink will provide all the angst any teenager needs. There is and always has been a market for romanticised sadness. But how does it compare with actual melancholia? There are marked similarities. For example, both conditions are incredibly self-indulgent. They both require a preoccupation or perhaps an obsession with the self. How am I feeling? What is happening to me? Michel Foucault called melancholia a kind of ‘monomania’. A one-track mind, which will focus only on the problem totally rejecting any solution.
Nostalgia is another factor in both conditions, longing after a golden past, grieving for what has been lost. But even these apparent similarities contain stark contrasts.
The pseudo-melancholic is indulgent in that their behaviour is self-focused, they isolate themselves quite deliberately. On the other hand, a melancholic hates the isolation, fears it, will even seek out friendships, parties, crowds and will happily spend their entire bank account buying drinks and presents just to numb that feeling of loneliness. This very gregariousness in turn isolates them because most people don’t know what to do with such a needy person. If you’re pseudo-melancholic you isolate yourself by deliberate withdrawal. The melancholic is ruining friendships with late night phone calls, a bombardment of text messages and perhaps even turning up on a doorstep in the early hours of the morning. In their desperation to avoid loneliness they, in fact, create it. They reach out with tainted hands that repel rather than attract.
The pseudo-melancholic’s loneliness, mood swings, tear stained face, are in fact a well-planned advertising campaign. They demand that people acknowledge their misery. At root it’s a way of seeking attention. Look at me. Join with me in my sadness. Share my tears. They seek sympathy, affirmation someone to share their pains, to console them, to agree they’ve been dealt a bad hand.
Melancholics, conversely, have no ulterior motive to their sadness. They do not and cannot revel in it. They do not seek to share it, they seek to eliminate it. Theirs is no romantic, nostalgic pain. It is the very weight of worlds of misery pressing them down and their only goal is escape either by distraction, sleep or finally death. Nietzsche said: “The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: It helps one through many a dreadful night.” Every melancholic knows this, has wrapped themselves in a blanket of non-existence and found relief there. It is in this ebb that glasses half filled become irrelevant. All effort is concentrated on one thing, monomaniacally; survival.
Thankfully, melancholics also have their bright spots. There are times when they rise from incapable to very very able. Able to relate to others, able to see the world as a shining beautiful place to be. They are the lucky ones, who will weep at the trite emotions of a pop song yet laugh at real adversity with the knowledge that it is beatable and with the wisdom to know how to keep going when the battle seems lost. I’m beginning to sound romantic. Forgive me. I’m still a recovering melancholic.
