It wasn’t easy, or cheap.
Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
The first time I didn't feel sad about feeling sad was on Sept. 17, 2013. I was in my therapist's office. More specifically, I was lying on a table, faceup, in my therapist's office. Maybe it sounds simple, but it was a trick I'd spent years practicing and trying to learn.
I do not mean that I take sadness lightly. Four and a half years ago, after a work-related immersion in sexual violence, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Subsequently, I was diagnosed with comorbid major depressive disorder. Comorbid to all that, I was diagnosed as alcoholic and suicidal. More than $20,000 worth of treatment later, I am no longer those things, but, as an evaluating psychiatrist put it in a report last year, I have "chronic," "recurring," "residual psychiatric symptoms" serious enough that she ruled me permanently disabled. I've been an emotional gal since always — "She has a lot of feelings," my best grad-school friend would chuckle by way of explanation when I got worked up about some topic or other in front of strangers — and my emotions now are enormous. Frustration over a failed attempt to buy a sold-out rug online ends in so much yelling and foot-stomping that my neighbors complain. The intensity of a pop song lands like a blunt punch to my chest and explodes any grief nestling there; the very day I'm writing this, Nicki Minaj made me cry in my car.
Sincerely: I do not take sadness lightly. But after a lot of retraining, I do take it wholly, life-alteringly differently than I was raised to, and than almost anyone else I know. Now, sometimes when I'm not sad and I think about sadness, that thought is accompanied by this startling one: I miss it.
Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
Pre-therapy, this is the only thing I was ever taught, implicitly and explicitly, about sadness: It is bad.
You do not want it. If you've got it, you should definitely try to get rid of it, fast as possible. Whatever you do, don't subject other people to it, because they do not like that.
Sadness can be legitimately problematic, absolutely. If your sadness comes from seemingly no place or even an obvious place but keeps you from participating in life or enjoying anything and refuses to abate no matter how long you go on letting it express itself, you of course can't keep living like that. But culturally, we aren't allowed to be sad even for a little while. Even when it's perfectly sensible. Even when, sometimes, we need it.
This is reflected in our entertainment. Watching Bridesmaids, I shake my head over how Melissa McCarthy slaps Kristen Wiig around and tells her to stop being sad, though she has recently lost her job, her savings, her home, and her best friend. (Miraculously, this solves Kristen Wiig's attitude problem.) In the third episode of MasterChef Junior's second season, judge Joe Bastianich tells a contestant who has ruined her shepherd's pie and possibly her dream of winning, the biggest dream she's had up to this point in her life, "When things are as bad as they can be, you gotta pull it together. Wipe your tears."
The contestant has been crying for mere seconds. She is 8 years old.
What does it say about our relationship to sadness that Joan Didion — who we can all agree is a pretty smart, educated, and worldly cookie — had to write an entire book about trying to learn how to grieve? This ethos was fine for me when mostly nothing bad happened and if it did, the accompanying sadness didn't linger for too long. But post-trauma, it turned out to be a massive impediment to my recovery.
I had a lot of symptoms. They all alarmed me, but equally so the most straightforward one: sadness. Sometimes I cried from uncontrollable, overwhelming, life-swallowing sadness. And all the time, the sadness and crying itself freaked me the fuck out. I would start crying, and then immediately hate myself. Why was I crying? Why couldn't I get this sadness to go away? What was wrong with me?
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How I Learned To Be OK With Feeling Sad