So exuberance can be accompanied by the dark side of emotional life, such as depression?
That's a terribly important aspect of exuberance. Many do have both sides. Like Virginia Woolf -- I get so sick of writers and filmmakers painting her as a doomed character. She was not a gloomy, doomy person. She had a bad disease, but for the most part she was vivacious, filled with laughter, had a wicked wit.
People need to know that very often the other side of despair is a great capacity for joy and capacity for life.
Any examples of how exuberance has played out in your life?
Exuberance is wonderful if you bring a sense of wonder or enthusiasm to something.
[During my husband's and my] first Christmas together, I bought 12 strands of Christmas tree lights -- we had a tree yay big [she gestures to show a tree about two feet tall]. We got in a big argument about it.
At the time he was outraged -- "You don't need half of those!" And I said, "The bulbs could go out, we can use them next year." He said, "Take the lights back!" I refused. We did eventually grow into the lights -- over 10 years our trees got bigger.
He thought it was funny about a month later.
But as you've said, sometimes healthy exuberance crosses the line into pathological behavior -- manic illness, for example.
I once started using a psychology article to teach residents about what a waste of time teaching rounds were on the floors. We had a dreadful rounds chief. I was deeply in love with that article. At the time, it had that significance, that exuberance, that over-the-top [quality]. I got in a lot of trouble from the ward chief. I was annoying.
Looking back, it's not that I wouldn't have taught that article. I remain very partial to this article, but I am not in love with it. [The problem] was the way that I [presented] it. It was not in a reasoned manner.
This is where exuberance goes aground. Very often it is the manner, the sense that you have an inner road to the truth and you alone [laugh] have that road to the truth. At the time, it seemed perfectly legitimate. But I paid for it -- from my ward chief, and partly because [shortly afterwards] I got wildly, psychotically manic.
Even if it's not manic, people often don't know what to make of exuberance, do they?
No question about it. Of those I interviewed for my book -- to the person -- they all said the same thing: People make fun of exuberant people. It's very easy to mock.
