Date: 1 Jul 2009 06:00 am (UTC)
My reaction to the "want to be miserable" thing is mixed. I can remember times in my life when I was quite unhappy but also had a fairly strong and persistent suspicion that I was borrowing trouble in order to justify my own unhappiness, and thereby excuse me from responsibility for fixing it myself. Which is not quite the same as wanting to be miserable, maybe, but it may be more or less what that expression is often a shorthand for. Of course, my suspecting that of myself doesn't mean it was so -- but the moments in which I grappled with that perception at least *felt* like my more honest moments. The way I understand that now, it wasn't really about wanting misery for its own sake, but wanting something to which misery seemed like a means, and wanting that something more than I wanted to be non-miserable. My best guess is that what I wanted was to have other people take care of me -- but then, that may itself have been an outgrowth of something like loneliness. Besides, maybe my wanting that more than I wanted to be non-miserable is an indicator that the degree of "non-miserable" of which I perceived myself to be capable at the time was still in fact pretty miserable, and so the whole "wanting to be miserable" thing was really more about choosing my variety of misery than choosing misery over non-misery.

(I should also note that at the times I'm thinking back to, I was probably about thirteen years old. To say that my early-adolescent psyche may have worked this way is not to say that it should be expected to be at all common in people who are way past that point in their lives.)
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