Search for Pollyanna

A two-part post that may surprise you.

When I was five my parents nicknamed me Polly, short for Pollyanna, the movie character played by Hayley Mills based on the Victorian novel of the same name. Pollyanna was eternally optimistic, with a “subconscious bias towards the positive.” So was I.

Until I wasn’t.

I am unsure of the catalyst. Maybe losing my parents, or menopause, but somewhere in my late forties my subconscious bias shifted from positive to negative, where it stubbornly remains.

I am not clinically depressed, nor do I have persistent depressive disorder. I enjoy genuinely loving relationships and have maintained interests. I have an appreciation for art and love of nature. But the feeling I consider my baseline, Pollyanna-like sunny optimism, has been dulled for so long that now I forget what it felt like.

My childhood and adolescence were not untroubled, and things happened that logically should have made me wary and bitter, but oddly, I traversed those years and through decades of my adult life persistently upbeat. The dimming came later, and gradually. Still. I am nothing if not a seasoned actress, and no one, except those I know intimately and pretty much my whole life, noticed the change. Even though I feel life’s joyful moments as onlooker rather than participant, people don’t see that distance in my face, or hear it in my voice.

I am genuinely happy for others’ happiness, and happiness once removed is less intense but satisfying. I experience breakthrough moments of joy, which is to say I can feel them discretely, but can’t string them together, or connect to them fundamentally.

I think I have considered this part of getting older, or just the way my life has worked out, or even the way life works out in general for all of us. I mean, I know how lucky I am. For every wonderful thing in my life, I am deeply grateful, but neither luck nor gratitude makes me happy. In fact, they make me feel guilty about not being happy.

Anyway, to be continued. This is a first for me, a two-part post, but I felt the subject needed an introduction before I get into the actual steps I’m taking to reclaim my innate subconscious bias toward the positive, or in other words, my search for Pollyanna, a.k.a. me.