When I went to see one this year, she noted that it is very common for people to wait until their 40’s to begin processing deep emotional scars, because until then it is simply too much, your life is too chaotic.
We have this concept in our culture of a “mid life crisis”. It tends to be viewed as a crisis of realizing one has been living inauthentically, and our culture is blamed. I would submit that deep wounds often simply take half a lifetime to emerge fully enough to be dealt with. Alternatively, we take half a lifetime to develop sufficient emotional strength to deal with such things, which causes the part of us which tries to protect us from overload to keep secrets.
I felt happy the other day, several times, inexplicably. For people unfamiliar with long term depression, happiness is an odd emotion. You look at it with skepticism, like a bird that has landed for a moment on your windowsill, but which obviously is on its way somewhere else.
And I felt happy in the middle of a demanding, frustrating twelve hour day, which was followed by another one.
And it occurred to me that feeling happiness when you are supposed to be angry, or sad, or whatever, is a sort of rebellion. We tend to assume that rebelling must be an act of anger, of overthrow, of attack.
But is not happiness an attack on sorrow? Is it not overthrowing what was in favor of what could be?
Thus I would meander. Yes thus.