For eighteen years, all I looked forward to in life was going away to college. College — and it didn’t particularly matter which college, so long as it was somewhere outside of Florida — would solve all the problems I’d been dealing with since elementary school: the interminable stream of uninteresting busywork from teachers; fundamentally not relating to my peers, and consequently not having very many friends; the perceived rigidity of my parents’ control over my life; the difficulties of being gay and dating while living at home; the boredom of South Florida.

That never quite delivered. Swarthmore was my first choice of schools, and in a lot of ways, it’s everything I could have reasonably hoped for in a school. Studying at Oxford this year has, likewise, been as good a university experience as any, I imagine. And yet, fundamentally, I’m still as dissatisfied with school, my friends, and — not to put too LiveJournal-ey a spin on it — my life as I was three years ago, when I graduated from high school, or ten years ago, when I left elementary school. I genuinely believe that, in the nearly 22 years I’ve been tooling around this planet, I’ve yet to actually be happy.

A piece I read on Salon earlier this week suggested, reasonably, that maybe dissatisfied is just how we, as humans, are wired to be:

I’m just not sure that “happiness” is supposed to be the stable human condition, and I think it’s punishing that we’re constantly being pushed to achieve it.

I felt the suffocating pressure to feel happiness most acutely in my 20s. … But I remember knowing at the time that “happy” was the one thing I could not be at that particular point. I could pay the rent, do my job, try not to get too drunk or go home with anyone dangerous, meet nice people, attempt to cobble together the foundation of an adult life that might hold something — Work? Home? Friends? Money? Marriage? Kids? — that might one day yield something closer to contentment. But at that point, I could not be happy, at least not on a regular basis. I was too filled with fear — about future, about money, about loneliness.

And maybe that is the answer. Maybe we’re so enchanted with this idea of “being happy” that we trap ourselves in a pattern of eternal dissatisfaction by constantly striving to achieve the Platonic ideal of a joyous, fulfilled existence.

On an instinctual level, though, I think that’s bullshit. We probably can’t achieve happiness on the model of a Nora Ephron movie; the only reason we watch Sleepless In Seattle is because it’s an unlivable fantasy. But at the very least, I hope for myself that I’ll be able to get out of bed in the morning because I actually want to, rather than because I have a list of tasks to accomplish.

As an aside, the times I feel I’ve come closest to wanting to get out of bed in the morning have been the times when I haven’t been in school. During my four months of working full-time at Apple this summer, even though I had long shifts every day and spent most of my time dealing with frustrating customers, I had a sense of purpose in going to work each morning. This might just have been a manifestation of my goal-driven nature, wherein I’m happiest when I have a set of clear objectives — write this essay, fix this laptop, replace this iPhone, fold this laundry — rather than an empty calendar. But, in any case, working at the Genius Bar, in a lot of ways, was more satisfying than writing papers at Swarthmore has ever been.

I’ve wondered, off and on, whether I should see a therapist or a psychologist to try to talk through all this.

The few times I went to a psychologist in high school, I found that I didn’t relate to him at all, and therefore got nothing out of the experience. He was outgoing and athletic, and seemed like he fell into the role of psychologist because, in between baseball games in college, people told him that he was easy to talk to. When the subject of my sexuality came up, for example, I told him I wasn’t gay. Our conversations were superficial and told me nothing, except that I didn’t like my psychologist. The experience, on the whole, was calamitous; I felt like I’d wasted five hours of my life lying to someone, and my parents felt like they’d wasted several hundred dollars paying for me to do so.

That one poor experience aside, I worry that if I talk to a professional about how I’ve been feeling that I’ll end up on antidepressants. And that scares me for a number of reasons.

My freshman year of college, a professor offhandedly mentioned depressive realism, which is the belief that depressed people actually have a more accurate view of the world than a baseline neutral/happy individual. I proceeded to get an A in that class — and in fact, in every class, seminar, or tutorial I’ve been in at Swarthmore or Oxford since. I couldn’t help but put the two together: was I doing so well, academically, because of undiagnosed depression that gave me a more accurate worldview?

Similarly, I worry that the parts of my personality that I like best — my generally bitter sense of humor, my prolific writing, my ability to think critically and argue a point well — are a product of that same potential depression. I can’t help but picture McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, lobotomized, when I think of what taking antidepressants might do to me. The only thing I fear more than being unhappy for the rest of my life is being falsely, medicatedly cheerful.

So, instead of speaking to someone, I’ve put my head down, thrived academically, and focused on graduating from college and making it into a good law or graduate school. I’m increasingly worried, though, that I’m headed for the same kind of disappointment I experienced at the end of high school, when things didn’t magically get better. But, trying to balance my fears about psychopharmacology with my persistent, occasionally overwhelming dissatisfaction, I’m not sure what would be worse: keeping things the way they are and hoping that, eventually, they’ll get better on their own; or risking new and different problems by trying to solve the ones I already have.