What is it with me and melancholy?
One day I stumbled upon it, latched the word and its letters onto an abstract emotion, and ran with it just like that.
I took something out of the realm of feeling and cushioned it into crystallized, expressive thought. I interpreted. And thus I made a motion that was supposed to ebb and flow into a cast-iron tidal wave. Impressive. Romantic. And immensely impractical.
What used to be sometimes become always and forevermore. Surrounded by thoughts, music, art, and literature of melancholy I would start into the day, and later at night, I would read some and then dream about it.
I had built something that was less working in a way to help me cope with the constant, chaotic diversity of emotions that overwhelmed me, but rather in a way that was dictating which was right and which was wrong. If I didn't feel melancholy, I didn't feel right. Or maybe I was just telling myself to think that, without actually feeling it at all.
I had created something of a lifestyle cult for myself: My very own, personal veganism.
And then, today, I stumble upon some orchestra music underlying a credit score, and it makes me feel hopeful.
Hope, hopeful, hopefulness.
That feels odd immediately.
Until it doesn't. Until it radiates in an unusual way, intriguing me to pursue it a little, if only for a second.
Which I do. Not just for a second.
I chase it all the way down it's narrow rabbit hole, that little feeling.
And what do I emerge with? Some kind of a fresh perspective. A slightly altered angle from which to look at all that happens. Whereas before, I most certainly would have experienced moving out of my parent's house like a sad thing of melancholic beauty, I know might be able to see it as a generally happy, adventurously hopeful circumstance.
Or maybe a sad, melancholic, hopeful one.
Either way, it adds a nice variety.