There is a photo of me from when I was about three years old. I wish I knew where the was, but it’s fallen into the void of my mom’s house. In the photo, I am wearing my “polka-dotty dress” which is white with tiny red polka dots and a red ribbon around the waist. It is my favorite dress and I feel extremely sassy in it. I have my dimpled hands on my hips and I’m grinning down at the camera from the top step of a porch. The sun halos me from behind, soft and orange in early eighties Kodachrome, but it’s my smile that Iights the image up. This is the last visual image I have of myself as a fundamentally happy person.

When I say “happy person”, I don’t mean “happy” in a situational or contextual sense. I have been happy many times in my life, and I have many happy memories to go with them. Wide-ranging conversations make me happy.  Reading a book on a rainy day makes me happy. My daughter’s grin makes my heart burst with happy. Infusing honey with lavender before the house wakes up makes me happy. The happiness that I feel in these moments is real, but it’s also contextual, not fundamental to me as a person.

I was happy because something made me happy. Happiness as a result of an external influence, not an integrated state of being. They exist like flashes in the brain pan of my day,  pulling me up out of a naturally neutral state. It’s not that I walk around unhappy – it’s more that  my resting state is  grave, depressed in the literal and clinical sense.

I am a depressive, but I am not anhedonic . I feel pleasure. I feel happiness. But neither are consistent or independent of external influence. Contentment is. I am, if not happy,  profoundly content.

For young me, “contentment” was the opposite of “really living”. It meant that you had settled, and I was not going to settle. I was going to blow out my emotional credit limit and pay the bill in my thirties.  Paying the bill was rough – necessary but rough. Five years of therapy later, I am modulated and mindful and wildly functional. I am also gratefully content. Ironically, contentment is, for me, its own kind of joy. It’s not the champagne of pure happiness. Rather, it’s the mulled wine of a hard won stability, which makes me very happy.

It’s lovely to feel that my life is good and complete. While contentment doesn’t eradicate the need for ongoing effort (some struggles have deep roots), but I feel myself to be in balance. My contentment is as fundamental to me as my gravity and neutrality. The scale still tips one way and the other, but it returns to it’s baseline, which is a strange and happy thing.

*Side Note:  I should explicitly state that what I’m describing isn’t the difference between being depressed or not depressed. Depression isn’t as simple as happy vs. sad, nor is depression synonymous with sadness, as any depressed person can tell you.