Fifteen years ago, I would have answered the question, “What positive emotion do you feel most often?” with elation. A perpetual high doesn’t make for a sustainable life, and in fact, I wavered between elation and despair (often in the same day). This was life with untreated bipolar disorder, fast cycling version.
Maybe because of the medication, and maybe because of getting older, my most common positive emotion is contentment. When I was younger, I thought of contentment as something inferior, as a curse that the fairy who didn’t get invited to the christening would cast on the poor baby*.
Now I prefer contentment. It’s nice to not have to feel the extremes all the time. I do not get exhausted with my contentment as I did with my elation. The opposite of contentment on the spectrum is discontent, which is not a crippling feeling like despair.
I would not trade contentment for the overdose of elation ever again. I like small doses of elation, but I treasure the anchor of calm, peaceful emotion that is contentment.
* This is a common trope in Western fairy tales in which a family presents a royal baby to the court at large in a christening (baptism) ceremony. The family invites all the witches/fairies/aunts save one. The uninvited one shows up anyhow and curses the baby. Sometimes the curse seems innocuous but causes a lot of harm, at times hilarious, to the child (for example, the child who could not tell a lie).
Words Like Me 