I was so unhappy when I got to the programme.
But I was very happy being unhappy.
How do I know?
I heavily resisted anyone who suggested gratitude for what I did have or hope for the future. I had a case built, and I wasn't about to let it go.
People that sympathised with me were killing me. They were effectively saying: "You have a right to be unhappy. How could you not be unhappy, given, X, Y, and Z?" They were telling me that my unhappiness was the right and natural response to what was going on. They were locking me inside the prison I had built for myself and turning the key.
When I was a few months in, someone asked me how I was. I said I would be OK when X, Y, and Z happened. He said, "Wishing your life away? Rejecting what God is offering you today?"
I was very angry. He wanted to take away my unhappiness, my self-pity, my gloom. So I clung to it tighter. Turns out my unhappiness was the Best Of All Possible Worlds, according to me.
But he was right. In my self-pity (for that is what all unhappiness is: feeling sad on my own account), I was denying the thousand goods in my life.
Thank God for people that did not make doe eyes and nod compassionately but instead said:
How can you adjust your attitude?
You've got a problem? Fine. What are you going to do about it?
You don't have any money? Fine. Get a job!
You feel useless? Do service! Make tea!
What action are you taking today?
What can you be grateful for today?
Who can you help today?
What can you accept with grace?
What can you change with vigour?
Sympathy is attack.
Cheerfulness is the opening up of a vista out of the darkness, if one genuinely wishes that above all things.