Needed Just As We Are

I frowned at the infographic. Detailed symptoms and signs for varying stress levels in neat, color-coded columns. As if emotions - life - were that easy to catalog.

Green means you and your calm, steady demeanor are thriving, focusing, taking things in stride. If you're feeling yellow, then something isn't quite right but you keep on keeping on. Orange indicates struggle; you feel like you can't continue, you're self-medicating and performing poorly. By the time you get to red - "I can't survive this" - you're experiencing a disabling distress and loss of function. 

Mental health and mental wellness (and there is a difference) are not so easily separated into rectangles like jars. Feelings are sloppy and uncooperative, like trying to pour water from a cup but instead it dribbles down the side of the glass and onto the floor. 

This list pokes me uncomfortably between the ribs, tells me I have never thrived for more than a month at a time. I hang out in the survival column: anxious and moody. I'm easily overwhelmed or irritated, I have difficulty adjusting to changes, and I operate with low energy. 

I've come to believe these are not symptoms, but my personality. I was created with a default setting of neutral tending toward melancholy. 

Treading the yellow waters of the survival column has been my normal for decades. Some months I kick furiously, some I just hold my breath and drift and blink at the sky. I might visit the colored surfs of flourishing green or losing-hope orange, but not long enough to make my fingers and toes prune.

Ancient Greek physicians and philosophers Hippocrates and Galen were first to float the idea of classifying personalities by four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. These eventually became the basis of today's multitudinous personality types. In a college course on interpersonal relations, I learned I fit into the ancient idea of melancholic personality. 

That knowledge planted itself and grew slowly until I recognized it as truth.  

The melancholic is a perfectionist, a careful thinker, creative, and highly emotional person. They have gleeful highs and disconsolate lows, coupled with anxiety about the present and future. They are sensitive and empathetic. Possibly because of perfectionist and analytical tendencies, they are prone to discontentment and depression. But they are also detail-oriented, self-motivated, and fiercely loyal and dependable.

I share space with Mother Teresa, George Washington, Albert Einstein, and Vincent van Gogh. The brave, the brilliant, the giving, the creating.

My fellow melancholics.

What does that mean for the colors of our stress? 

I think the rainbow is wrong.

There are times in my life - becoming more frequent, more unshakable - when I think I just wasn't meant to thrive, at least not as narrowly defined in this stress chart. But I'm not in survival mode; this is how I react to life. The world is brutal and dazzling and evades explanation. And perhaps this is how I am meant to move through it: with deep feelings, hard questions, thoughtfulness, anxiety, and love. 

Thriving - being fully alive - isn't feeling happy and bulletproof all of the time; we've gotten that wrong. Living life vigorously means experiencing the full range between happiness and sadness, regret and pride, fullness and longing. That's why the world needs melancholy people, just as we are. The skeptics, the artists, the noticers, the empathetic - we balance out all that pervasive toxic positivity, see situations from all angles, mind the details, and create the paintings, music, and stories that a society seeks out to feel alive. 

I smile at the sparkles on the deep snowdrifts after an ice storm. I feel the bittersweetness of packing away decorations that hung on my children's walls when they were babies. I hurt for the people standing beneath the shadow of the bomb that's about to explode. I worry about what happens, and it is exhausting.  

Maybe some people will never feel good for the long-term, no matter what. Could we approach that not as a symptom to be treated, but a difference to be recognized and respected? 

Glennon Doyle wrote that she's a person who feels deeply, inhabiting a messy world. She brilliantly said, "When someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, 'For the same reason I laugh so often - because I'm paying attention.'" 

So am I.