I remember so clearly the day of my preschool graduation. I wore a white dress with a chiffon, flowy hem. It was finally time step over the wooden bridge that was built specifically for Pumpkin Patch Preschool’s graduation. Although the bridge was only a few feet long, it felt monumental crossing it. As an adult, I can look back at that moment and see how sweet it must have been: watching children of four and five walk across this homemade rite of passage. All topped with the bright orange graduation caps we had made out of craft paper and glitter the week before. So darling it all was that someone from an outsider’s perspective would not know the question that had been asked me, and was weighing on me greatly. Before the ceremony, we were asked to prepare our answer to, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” There was an incessant pressure inside me that I wonder if the other children felt as well. The question is simple enough, and surely we’d all been asked before. But something about this being a ceremonial day made me want to be honest, like I hadn’t been before.

One by one, a child would step their way across the bridge, and take in their small hand the homemade diploma to match the caps on our heads. Each student sung out brilliant answers in hopeful voices: “vet,” “doctor,” “scientist,” “teacher.” My stomach twisted slightly as I realized it was my turn. I stepped my white sandals over the bridge, and after, took the hand of my favorite teacher. She crouched to my height, asked me the question that felt life defining in the moment. The black muff of the microphone grazed against my lips, as I considered repeating one of my classmates answers as not to be the odd one out. But out came what felt true to me. “Happy.” The moment felt large for me, but before I knew it, the classmate behind me was crossing the bridge as well. I’m grateful for this memory, even if it was only a grand moment from my perspective, it led me to an important question.

Already, at five years old, I had absorbed the idea that happiness was the ultimate measurement of a good life. Already, I had placed the pressures of having a good life on my shoulders. I heard it constantly: “Are you happy?” “They must not be happy in that situation.” “If they were happy, they would not have done that to themselves.” But why is this one particular emotion considered the standard of well-being? In cultures that place strong emphasis on positivity, many people feel pressure to remain happy at all times. But I have learned since then that happiness is only one emotion among many, all of which move in and out of human life continuously. Experiences change, emotions change with them, and the pursuit of permanent happiness creates unrealistic expectations about emotional life.

So often I hear the expectation that happiness function as a permanent emotional baseline. This idea is reinforced through everyday language such as “choose happiness” or “find your happiness,” both of which imply that happiness is something stable that can be achieved and permanently maintained. Psychological research, however, directly contradicts this idea because emotions are inherently transient. They arise in response to experiences and naturally fade as circumstances shift or lose intensity. Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart illustrates this beautifully by emphasizing how limited emotional vocabulary often causes people to reduce their experiences to simplistic terms like “happy” or “fine”. This vagueness contributes to the illusion that happiness should dominate emotional life. In reality, expecting happiness to persist indefinitely ignores the fundamental nature of human emotion itself.

All too often, the concept of happiness being permanently secured through the right achievements, habits, or life choices is riddled in our day to day lives. This belief appears constantly in self-help culture and societal narratives surrounding success. They suggest that if people make the correct decisions, establish productive routines, and reach important milestones, lasting happiness will inevitably follow. Although certain choices can improve well-being, research suggests their emotional effects are often temporary. This phenomenon is explained through hedonic adaptation, which refers to the tendency for individuals to return to relatively stable emotional states after positive or negative events. A great example lies in those who have enjoyed major, positive life events, such as winning the lottery, and do not produce permanent increases in happiness. Over time, individuals emotionally adapt to new circumstances, and the intensity associated with those experiences diminishes, no matter what the situation or associated emotions may be. Even ideal conditions cannot permanently sustain happiness. The expectation that they should only widens the disconnect between reality and perception.

What hurts me most, and I believe hurts others as well, is believing this notion that if someone is not happy, they must have done something inherently wrong, or failed in some spectacular way. When happiness is treated as the emotional standard, any deviation from it becomes suspicious. Feelings such as sadness, frustration, loneliness, or emptiness are interpreted as problems to eliminate rather than natural aspects of human existence. Psychological research suggests this mindset may negatively affect well-being because it places people in constant evaluation of their emotional state. Subjective well-being is not defined solely through positive emotions, but through a combination of life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. Negative emotions are not only inevitable, but functional. They provide information, communicate needs, and contribute to emotional growth and emotional intelligence. When these emotions are pathologized, individuals lose an important aspect of understanding themselves.

Research on well-being provides a more accurate framework for understanding emotional life. Instead of focusing exclusively on happiness, psychologists often use the concept of subjective well-being to describe a broader sense of life satisfaction. A recent study found that the percentage of Americans who described themselves as “very satisfied” with their personal lives fell from 65% in 2020 to only 44% in 2025. This decline suggests not only that emotional states fluctuate over time, but also that happiness is not a permanent condition people can simply achieve and maintain. Studies similarly show that individuals can report meaningful and fulfilling lives even when they are not consistently happy. A good life, therefore, may be less dependent on constant positive emotion and more connected to factors such as purpose, acceptance, emotional depth, and stability.

The misunderstanding of happiness is further reinforced because of how loosely the term itself is used. People frequently use “happiness” as a catch-all phrase to describe experiences ranging from peace and contentment to excitement and joy. This lack of specificity makes happiness difficult to sustain because it does not refer to one singular emotional state. Brené Brown argues that increasing emotional granularity, or the ability to accurately identify and label emotions, improves emotional understanding and regulation. When people rely too heavily on the vague concept of happiness, they overlook the complexity of emotional life and lose appreciation for the full spectrum of human experience.

The consequences of misunderstanding happiness may seem small or insignificant, but they contribute to unrealistic emotional expectations. When individuals believe they should feel happy most of the time, they often become less tolerant of discomfort and more critical of themselves whenever negative emotions arise. This creates an unrealistic emotional standard that is difficult to sustain. People are often poor predictors of what will make them happy and tend to overestimate the long-term emotional impact of future events. This miscalculation reinforces the idea that happiness is something to permanently maintain rather than temporarily experience. As a result, people may continue chasing future achievements or circumstances believing they will finally produce lasting happiness, only to discover that the feeling inevitably fades.

Reframing happiness requires a shift in perspective. I personally experienced the pressures and consequences of chasing happiness as a permanent emotional state. However, understanding the complexity of emotional life has led me toward a deeper sense of contentment with the constantly shifting nature of human emotion. Even throughout the most painful periods of my life, there has been gratitude in simply experiencing life at all. Happiness is not meant to be permanent, achievements cannot secure it forever, and negative emotions are not evidence of failure. Understanding this allows individuals to approach emotional life with greater realism and self-compassion.

Looking back, I do not regret what I said at my preschool graduation. My answer reflected a genuine desire for fulfillment and meaning. However, without a deeper understanding of what truly creates contentment, I am not sure I could ever fully recognize it. Human life cannot be reduced to one singular emotion. It is built from layers of experiences, each carrying different emotions, all temporary and necessary in their own ways. Understanding that emotional richness, rather than permanent happiness, defines a meaningful life has only deepened my appreciation for being alive.

All that to say, I’m glad I’m not happy.

xo, A. Song

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Understanding psychology has been a major focus in my life, not only in my educational endeavors, but for the improvement it brings to my daily life. If you are or know someone part of generation A, or Z, you’ll know I am not alone in this. What might have been considered a niche interest to generations prior is now mainstream knowledge. Psychological language has become increasingly common in my and my peers’ everyday conversations. Terms that once belonged primarily to clinicians now casually come up in social settings. It’s changed how people connect within their relationships as they express their emotions and identities. This shift has no doubt added to the visibility of mental health challenges, along with accessibility to the treatments of them. The ever-growing awareness, diagnosis, and treatment has led to broader scales of diagnosable mental illness. Up until this point, I’ve considered this a positive change, but I wonder just how broad those scales will become? How slight a mental challenge will one need to experience in order to receive diagnosis and treatment, and should that be the goal? Our society’s count of people with neurotypical brains is shrinking. Is this beneficial, or are we beginning to pathologize what it means to be human?

On one hand, the expansion of psychological knowledge has allowed more people to recognize their struggle, and seek out help. On the other, the broadening of diagnostic categories as well as the normalization of clinical language may be changing how we interpret what used to be considered ordinary emotional experiences. All that to say, I am here to question the ideal of psychological normalcy in the age of diagnosis. To do so, I will dive into four major perspectives: the benefits of expanded diagnosis and access to care, the evolving definition of recovery and remission, the rise in diagnosis and its possible explanations, and the role of pharmaceutical treatment in shaping the modern understanding of mental health.

The first perspective considers the clear advantages of increased awareness and diagnosis. This is where most of my prior knowledge on this subject lies, since I witness the benefits in this growth amongst my peers and community everyday. Especially since historically, mental health conditions were so often misunderstood, stigmatized, or even ignored outright. Many individuals who struggled with depression, anxiety, or attention disorders had little or no access to treatment. Not only that, but the language to describe or comprehend their experience was lacking. Today, diagnostic frameworks provide validation as well as routes to care. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in five adults in the United States experiences a mental illness each year. When I first read this, I found it a bit astounding, but it reflects a modern system that is more capable of identifying such psychological distress. Some scholars argue that diagnosis, when used appropriately, can be protective, helping individuals access necessary treatment and reducing the risk of untreated conditions worsening over time. With this in mind, the rise in diagnoses could be seen as progress, and not excessive.

But the second perspective adds nuance to this optimism by examining what it means to “recover.” The Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression study provides a useful case diving into this term. This study followed over 4,000 participants through multiple levels of treatment. The study found that many individuals could reach remission through the supplied treatment plans. This challenges the current frameworks where mental illness are strongly tied to identity, and often considered chronic, and instead frames it as something that is treatable. However, the concept of remission and recovery is not always straightforward, especially in relation to mental health. This makes me wonder: if this “recovery” requires continuous medical intervention, should it even be considered recovery? That would be like a broken bone being considered healed, but only if the injured person continues to wear a cast. Yes this example is only somewhat related, but it brings up the major point that I am curious about here. What should we consider to be healed or recovered, when it comes to mental health?

The third perspective addresses the noticeable increase in diagnosis and asks whether this reflects a genuine rise in mental illness, or merely a shift in how it is defined. Over time, diagnostic criteria have expanded, specifically with revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical

Manual of Mental Disorders. Some critics, argue that some conditions, particularly depression, may now include responses to normal life stressors that were not previously considered pathological. From this viewpoint, grief, anxiety, and sadness risk being reclassified as disorders rather than recognized as what they used to be considered, just aspects of life and the human experience. At the same time, others argue that increased reporting and awareness, not over diagnosis, actually explain the rise in numbers. Increased cultural awareness, reduced stigma, and better screening tools may just be shedding light on conditions that were always present, but not recognized. This creates a gray area between what could be considered expanded understanding, and expanded pathology.

The fourth perspective considers the role of pharmaceutical treatment as well as the broader medical system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry, particularly in the area of mental health medications, cannot go unnoticed. The pharmaceutical market in the U.S. has reached hundreds of billions of dollars, with antidepressants and related medications comprising a substantial portion of that. Some critics say that this economic context could influence how mental health is defined and treated, and could lead to an encouragement in the medicalized view of distress. However, it is just as important take note of the undeniable benefits many individuals have experienced with the increase in availability of treatment. The process of medicalization often reflects both social needs and institutional structures, rather than a single intentional force. This suggests that the relationship between diagnosis, treatment, and industry is nuanced, and cannot be assumed as purely exploitive.

Taken together, my understanding of this nuanced question is now more informed, but even so, leaves me unresolved. Increased diagnosis can be validating, but potentially limiting. Treatment can be effective, but conceptually ambiguous. Rising statistics can indicate both improved awareness and shifting definitions. Pharmaceutical involvement can represent both innovation and influence. So rather than pointing at an obvious answer, these contradictions may come together to represent the evolution of mental health alongside cultural changes.

Ultimately, the question may not be whether or not we have apathologized being human, but rather how our definition of being human is changing. Emotional experiences that were once considered private are now named, shared, categorized, and treated within a clinical context. This shift has undeniable benefits for those who have been historically overlooked or misunderstood. At the same time, it challenges us to consider where we draw the line between disorder, and experience. As our language and ideas continue to evolve, so will our understanding of what it means to be mentally ill or mentally well—or more simply, what it means to be human.

xo,

A.Song

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I met someone who made me buy pre-pitted dates. I’m usually one that likes things in their raw, untouched form. Anything that takes a bit of work, in my opinion, is worth working a bit for, ie. a lifelong friendship, body confidence, a sweet date (activity), or a sweet date (fruit). A sweet date has its own ritual: the ripeness, the fullness, followed by the careful attention it takes to open it up and savor what’s inside. It’s a ceremony, really, but in the back of my mind I’m reminded of the easier option, the pre-pitted kind. I could let someone else do the preening, and simply feast on their tender insides, but would I enjoy it nearly as much?

I feel the same about love. Love calls to me from every avenue of my life, and every crevice in my heart because I’m a romantic. I’m a lovergirl. I LOVE love, and I love experiencing it. But I know the second I find it again, I’ll toss my dreams aside in order to put it first. It’s funny because I know I didn’t invent this lovergirl heart. It was gifted to me, wrapped in pink fairy tales and silver linings that told me “your other half is out there, you just have to find it.” That, combined with sappy, tender K-dramas, societal rhetoric that taught girls to orbit around love, and a mother who was a lovergirl herself, meant I was destined to pine for it.

As girls, we were raised on fairytales and spoon-fed lies that tasted sweet but hurt our tummies. “You just need to find the right man.” “If he teases you, it means he likes you.” “Be alluring, but never too much.” So not to ‘blame society’--because I think that takes away from a woman’s ability to finally turn away from what’s been historically expected of her--but just to touch on it: We were taught to be walking billboards, ads for our own virginity and fertility; putting ourselves up for sale while tight-walking the line of being called cheap. To that I say, I’m taking myself off the love market.

And this is coming from someone who doesn’t resent men, despite how common that sentiment has become. I love men, not in a longing or pedestalizing way, but in an awareness of their place in the necessary oppositions of life: sadness and happiness, despair and joy, struggle and success, hate and love, men and women. I love men just as I love women, and I’ve decentered romantic love about as much as a self-proclaimed hopeful romantic possibly can.

With that being said, there are still gaps in the decentering. As I said before, I love love. I love the idea of growing old with someone, building a life with them, moving through the ordinary and the extraordinary side by side. I love having that one person to share the tiniest bits of your day with, and knowing it’s not a bother because they’re doing the same. And yes, through my decentering of romantic love, I’ve found pieces of that love in my friendships, but there are still certain things that only a lover can give--the tender kiss that barely brushes your lips, the subtle but strong magnetism that pulls your chest toward theirs, staring at them for as long as you please, admiring them, and them feeling safe enough to let you.

So to fill these gaps for my ever-wandering, forever-lusting, wistfully fluttering heart, I started a list. It began as a simple checklist of my tastes in a lover, but soon spun into something a bit more complex. My list went from “dark hair” and “artsy” to oddly specific quirks, like “has that little space between the base of their pointer and ring fingers” and “pits my dates for me”

My ever growing and ever changing list eventually unfurled and made me realize that the impossible vision of the lover from my list was just a way to keep me single. Anyone I held up to it would inevitably fail, and I would remain focused on centering myself in my own life.

Though the lovergirl in me still whispers that the right person will check every box.

Until then, I’ll keep pitting my dates instead of going on them. And when a potential lover makes the gaps feel a little too big to bear on my own, I’ll buy the pre-pitted ones.

xo,

A. Song

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As I begin my exploration of some of the greats, like Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Kafka, I’m struck by how often their pain, suffering, or addictions are framed as the source of their brilliance. After reading pieces of their work, and watching or reading others’ reflections, I’ve noticed a pattern: It’s not always the artists who claim this connection, but the narration, the structure, and the way we’ve come to tell their stories. It’s as if their anguish is a necessary rite of passage, or a sacred offering that gave birth to their art. But do we have to see it that way?

Consider Dostoyevsky. Many of his greatest works were deeply reflective of his own life. In Crime and Punishment, the psychological torment of Raskolnikov mirrors Dostoyevsky’s own grappling with morality, guilt, and faith. He was imprisoned in Siberia for years after being sentenced to death for political dissent. That experience profoundly shaped his worldview and writing. The line between author and character often blurs, which makes his pain feel inseparable from his pages.

Then there’s Hemingway. I don’t know about you, but I met Hemingway through his pain: his alcoholic father, his overbearing mother, the war, the drinking, the depression. We speak of him through these lenses as if the man and the myth must suffer for us to admire him. But what would we know of him if we weren’t so fixed on this belief that great art must be born from great pain? What would we remember if we believed art could just as powerfully come from pleasure, from presence, from a sense of fullness rather than fracture?

Finally, I read found that same rhetoric in The Creative Act; Rick Rubin offers a different lens. He writes, “To be an artist is to be a conduit. In some moments, we may be moved to create from joy, in others from sorrow or confusion. The source does not matter. What matters is making something.” He suggests pain isn't a requirement for creation. In fact, he encourages artists to choose the more sustainable path when possible: “If you can choose between creating through joy or suffering, why not choose joy?”

That makes me wonder: do all artists truly have that choice? Or are some of us wired to reach into our own wreckage, not because we want to, but because it’s the only place we’re told it comes from? And if we, the audience, keep returning to their pain as the only source of their work, do we also trap them there? If we see artists as only shaped by their pain, then by proxy, are we expecting them to keep experiencing it for us too?

Take Virginia Woolf. Her final letter to her husband Leonard was never meant for public eyes, but it’s become part of her mythology. “I feel certain I am going mad again,” she writes, followed by a devastating farewell and a praise of his kindness. “Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.” It’s a deeply personal moment, but like so much of her life, its soul has been absorbed and morphed into the story we tell(sell*) of her artistry. Something meant for the two of them was distributed to all to expose her creative mind, her fragility, and her genius.

Kafka, too, never intended for his unpublished work to be seen. He asked for his manuscripts to be destroyed after his death, but his friend ignored that wish. Now, his raw inner world is taught, dissected, quoted, and praised. This makes me wonder even more deeply: are we selfish in the way we consume the pain of artists? In our desire for beauty and meaning, do we expect them to feel for us, to live and relive their suffering just so we can call it profound? Do we ask them, not literally, but in some unspoken way, to turn agony into something we can understand?

Maybe that’s what we do with all great artists. We take the intimate and make it public. We make it art. But at what cost?

I don’t completely disagree with turning pain into art. Much of my own work has come from places of deep hurt, because those are often the moments that demand with a brimming heat inside you to be shaped into something, anything tangible. But what if it didn’t always have to be that way?

There’s a long history of romanticizing the suffering artist. We canonize their brilliance, often entwining it with their downfall, as if their work and their wounds are inseparable. But maybe we should begin to question that narrative. What if we chose joy when we could? What if we believed that pleasure, too, could hold meaning, and that wholeness could be just as compelling as brokenness?

Maybe I know less about these artists than I should to be asking these questions. But I will cry on the hill of curiosity. So I’ll leave you with this: what might art look like if it didn’t always come from pain? If instead, we sometimes allowed joy to be the origin.

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My mother says it’s something she felt for a week, then went for a walk and never felt again. I tried to tell her about this awful pit my body seems to crave returning to, like a sick homeostasis. A numb, painful emptiness that I know I’ll come back to, and am currently in again. So, what is that? I know I could find other explanations, other reasons that aren’t that. Like the fact that I only slept four hours last night, or that it was raining this morning. Although my olfactory senses quite enjoy it, without the sun in the morning, I don’t feel any need to get out of bed. So I didn’t. I stayed there until about thirty minutes ago, when I rose to write this. Now, I’m having a coffee I made a touch too strong (if you knew me, you’d know how contradictory that is, considering how blatantly and annoyingly I proclaim my love for coffee with a bite). But maybe today, I’m just too melancholy to take any extra bitterness.

Is depression that incessant ache and emptiness? Or can those symptoms, along with all the others; be explained environmentally? Does the true stickiness and realness of depression lie in when the person experiencing what should be a fleeting emotion, believes they deserve it? When their self-worth is so low that sinking into that depressive state feels oddly right and therefore perpetuates itself? I’ve taken such a passive role in my own depression. Doing what I can when I can, but when the deepest pits of it reach up to drag me down, I relent. I let it pull me under and cradle me in its depths, until it too grows tired of me and lets me float back up — just so I don’t forget how good it can be, so the depths don’t lose their bite when I inevitably return.

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The first time it happened, I was caught off guard; though in hindsight, I was the only one. That much should have been clear from the quiet chuckle that slipped from his throat, amused by the shift in pressure, and the unfamiliar contours of new territory.

But I was [an age I’ll choose to censor, but feel free to reference a heroine from your favorite coming-of-age film], on the cusp of discovering who I was, or who I thought I wanted to be. And since those two things had yet to draw any distinction, I did what others wanted.

You see, I liked the way the mirror looked back at me. But I’m a romantic, and a hedonist at heart. Everything I see is beautiful. So expecting someone else to think the same seemed almost too much to ask.

To soothe this, my naive mind took to people-pleasing as a mechanism to blind others to my undeveloped sense of self. In that, I became the mirror everyone liked to see themselves in. I reflected. Especially the self-proclaimed “hipsters,” who were their own version of unmoored and liminal, but to the tune of baggy thrifted sweaters, disheveled hair, and cuffed jeans bought a few sizes too small, stretched to fit with constant wear.

They were just the baby-faced form of the fully evolved, pretentious, and artsy men they are today (who, I confess, are still my type, but for different reasons now).

Moments after that “surprise,” I turned around and uttered something I didn’t even think twice about. Words that, over a decade later, he’d tell me were the sexiest thing he’d ever heard:

“You better put that back where it belongs.”

Had my people-pleasing skills reached such a high level of performance that, even in an utterly intimate and mortifying moment, I was able to put him back in his place? Or was that a glimpse into the person I embody now, saying, fuck the people-pleasing and fuck me how I please.

The answer to that probably lies somewhere near the very faint line between sexy and shitty; a place where the act of people-pleasing frequents.

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What I know to be love; will it feel the same in years to come? My first and only love enveloped me in a whirlwind of romance, whimsy, and dreamy allure. Things I'd only ever fantasized about before. Yet, beneath it all lingered a sensation that made me question whether I truly deserved it. What I once called butterflies, or the experience of "soul ties," could easily be relabeled as manifestations of insecurity and anxiety. That is, if I were jaded. But I choose not to be.

I choose to believe the love I felt was real, true, and filled with all the magic my youthful heart could dream of.

Still, it begs the question: as insecurities fade, does love shift alongside them? Is what we call love shaped by the vulnerabilities we carry, or does it transform into something equally profound as we grow?

Can the same love ever find us twice?

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