A minor setback today. Opened my monthly envelope from the Province that usually has my monthly cheque in it only to find my monthly stub had not be submitted to the welfare office.

As usual, I had entrusted it to my roomie Joe, who, being the awesome guy that he is, usually drops it off at the office after I fill it out each month. This saves me from having to make a trip to the office and is greatly appreciated by yours truly.

Quite unusually, this month, he forgot. So I do not yet have my cheque. I went to the office and filled out a stub, and in the old days they would have just handed me the cheque at that point.

But now, they mail it. It will go in the mail tomorrow, and hopefully arrive Monday or Tuesday. This might seem odd, but I can see why they had to change things. I bet that in the old days, a lot of people just got into the habit of showing up at the office to pick up their check on Check Day and did not bother to fill out the stub beforehand like they were supposed to do.

Thus, the office was a madhouse on Check Day and the day after, and it overworked the poor social workers and caused a lot of ruckus.

This way, nobody gets instant gratification. You show up late, and it gets put in the mail the next day. And the next day is Thursday or Friday, so the odds are good that you will not be seeing that cheque until after the weekend.

And so you won’t have any money for like, days, and so you won’t be able to go drinking with all your reprobate friends and they will laugh at you for being lame, and that should be enough incentive for you to get the damn thing in on time next time.

And seeing as this normally does not affect me at all, I must say I approve. Sure, it will be a pain in the ass this month, but I could not help but notice that the welfare office was not a madhouse today, and security guard (they always have them on the heavy days now) looked bored.

And ridiculously young, but that is just me being old. (Seriously, he looked 16 to me. 18 tops. )

This was also a therapy day. A productive session. Talked about the whole idea of raising one’s baseline mood. Right now, my basic mood is depressed. Not severely depressed, because that is something we dysthymic depression types tend to avoid via extreme sedentary lifestyles. But our apparent calmness and lack of drama compared to a more anxious depressive comes at a heavy price, that of a heavily proscribed lifestyle.

So I am chewing over this whole raising the base mood idea. It has a lot of appeal. I have thought for a long time that the right way to live would be to somehow set your default mood to “happy” and so you are happy except when something absolutely forces you into some other less pleasant mood.

Thus, inertia would be on the side of happiness, and you would build up a deep thick layer of happiness that would protect you from small things making you unhappy.

You would just roll right over the little bumps and jostles of life like a steamroller, while you sit in the driver’s seat, unperturbed.

And there are people like that out there, so it is definitely possible. Psychological studies show that these are probably some of the healthiest people in the world, both physically and mentally. They often have some kind of religious faith, but not always. And the religious faith is just part of an overall vigorously optimistic outlook on life.

So if it is possible to become more like that, it seems like a worthwhile goal. Instead, so many of us walk around with an enormous hole to fill inside us, and that makes us think that happiness is something you get, or have to earn, or acquire through possessions.

Happiness as a default state would strike a lot of people as cheating somehow. Why do anything if you are already happy? But that is a very narrow and unrealistic concept of happiness.

Happy people feel motivated by life, and enjoy it so much that they are quite content to engage with it very energetically. They find life rewarding. They see life as an endless smorgasbord of delights.

So far from just sitting there, blissed out, they do a lot more than unhappy people.

That is the sort of person I would like to be. I suppose we all would, really. But I feel deep down that this is a real possibility for me. Maybe not soon, but some day, when I have cleared a lot more of the psychological dead weight from my psyche and thus can let my natural levity buoy me up.

And then just bounce through life like a happy balloon.

Certainly, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. I am increasingly aware, however, of the exact nature of my problem. There is this heavy weight of icy cold fear inside me that cancels out actions before I can even think about doing them. Its terrible gravity keeps me way down in my own hole, the one in the middle of my soul where a warm and beating heart should be.

And there is no shortcut to getting rid of that. It can only be burned off or dumped a little at a time.

I am learned to see my life as a small but constant pressure towards the good. It can be a frustratingly slow process sometimes, but over time, it does produce results. I become a more solid, more confident, more “together” version of myself, and the impurities are burned away.

The secret is to stay in touch with my emotions and let the steam out slowly. I am going to a slightly lower Paxil dose, 35/mg/day instead of 40, which should help.

It is time to slowly dial back the anesthetic and learn to walk again.