Being Happy Is Hard Work

I’ve always had a tendency to focus on the negative — I’m trying to change that

Photo: Rika Hayashi/Getty Images

Like many people, I struggle semiregularly with depression — or, as David Foster Wallace so fittingly called it, The Bad Thing. It doesn’t define me, but it does flare up from time to time, a swamp creature rearing out of my mind’s chemical pulp. Recently, amid a surge of badness so…