How Am I Insane? Let Me Count the Ways

Insane:  Exhibiting unsoundness or disorder of mind.

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

Most of the people I know with some mild form of mental illness keep this hidden to others.  I'm always surprised when people are surprised that I struggle so mightily with depression and anxiety.  

"I didn't know!" they'll say.  I think most people would put me in the cool, calm, and collected category, unaware that inside things can be awhirl.  It's the duck analogy - on the surface you see a smooth transit but under the water legs are furiously churning and all is chaos.  This is what people with mental illness do -  cope and adapt and manage it.  We can't walk around in the world saying: "Good morning.  How am I?  I'm sort of terrified and I don't why."  It wouldn't go over very well.  It would have been problematic in a sales call, for instance, or on a first date, unless the woman I was with was even more terrified than me.

I am excluding those poor souls wandering around downtown talking about aliens in the government fucking with their brain waves.  They're not hiding it.  Actually, what do I know?  Maybe they are hiding it.  Maybe the behavior they're exhibiting is pretty subtle for them.

I talked to a buddy yesterday who's a religious guy.  Maybe he's spiritual, too, but he's sure religious.  He has found a center to his life that makes sense to him.  He uses it to transcend?  evade? mask? overcome? many difficulties in his life.  I've got a faith, too, but not to his degree.  I understand the idea of learning a perspective on things so that you can look beyond the aches and pains and trials and tribulations of life - this can be hard to put into practice and most of us seem to have a few things that stick in our craw and are hard to dislodge.  My wife is long-suffering about her family - I become bogged down in the physical aches and pains of life.

He wondered what brought me "joy," cautioning that there's a difference between happiness - a transitory feeling - and joy - a deeper seated, more profound feeling.  Here's one take on the topic:

That is because happiness is an emotion in which we "experience feelings ranging from contentment and satisfaction to bliss and intense pleasure," whereas joy "is a stronger, less common feeling than happiness."  We experience joy when we achieve selflessness to the point of personal sacrifice.  We feel joy when we are spiritually connected to God or people.  Joy, on the other hand, is at least grounded in the idea that something is good for someone else.  We have joy when -- even in our suffering -- we are acting toward someone else's well-being.   If you have ever selflessly given of yourself or that which you own you are certainly familiar with this feeling.

I don't know - that's a ton of parsing.  However, I intuit the difference.  I am also eager to reject it as too religiousy.