what to do with sadness

I came back from a trip recently, and the day after my return home I felt sad. I can call it sad now that I have spent some time with it, but I didn’t recognize it as sadness right away, until I had already tried to force my way past it into gratitude. 

My experience with sadness went like this. I woke up feeling heavy. As I was making my bed I heard this in my mind: I feel icky. I feel like I don’t recognize myself. I don’t really feel like I’m here. Actually, I’m a little numb. I should be grateful. I love my life, my family, my work. What’s wrong with me? That’s when I felt the tension in my body, and an ache in my chest. And then it sounded like this in my mind: Ohhhh, I’m trying not to feel something I actually feel. What do I actually feel? If I’m honest, I think I feel sad. I can feel the gratitude but I feel far away from it. I feel down. I am sad. Why am I sad? Transitions are hard for me. Leaving a special place is hard for me. What do I need? I just need to make space to move slow today, even if it doesn’t make sense. I need to move slow and let the sadness be here with me. I am sad because I love my life. I am sad because I don’t want things to be over so soon. It’s okay for that to be true about me. I can move slow. 

Then I went downstairs, and I walked the dogs slowly. I told myself I didn’t need to talk to anyone if I didn’t want to. I wore sunglasses to the grocery store so I could give my sad-face some privacy in the world. When I got home I threw some laundry into the washing machine and forgot about it for hours. I came out to my office to reconnect with my work, and when I got out here I didn’t feel like working. I pulled out a dog-chewed book I had saved for blackout-poetry, and I let my sadness guide me through a page, using a sharpie to black out the words that don’t fit, keeping the words that did. 

This is what my sadness showed me:

wound

still there

remained in the same state

reservation

but once

the first rise

the new road

all the way down

into the narrow valley

watch

flash

light

marvel at the magical

people

nomadic

moving with the seasons

migratory

follow the sun

As I looked back over my blackout poem I could see what my sadness wanted me to see:

I have a wound I might not fully see yet and some sadness I might not fully understand yet. I have reservations about letting that be true. But if I can let it rise, even just once, there will be a new road that forms, down into the depths of me, and in that place there will be also be light, and I can marvel at the magic that it exists within the darkness of the wound. We don’t stay in one place, physically or emotionally, ever. We are always moving, with the seasons of our lives, and the emotions of our experiences, towards the light, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

By the afternoon, I noticed that I had started singing. Then I sat down to play the piano. Then my body felt lighter and began to move a little faster. It didn’t feel so heavy. I could still feel my sadness but I wasn’t trying to make it go away.

As part of our human experience we will all have emotions that are harder to recognize than others, and uncomfortable, or even impossible, to feel. Sadness is one of these for many people. Most of us, in this contemporary North American culture, are afraid that if we let sadness in it will take over, it will take us out. I honour that fear. I have it too. See how my system wanted to bypass my sadness and move quickly to gratitude instead? That’s what my system learned to do with that emotion when I was a little girl. That was the script. So my system’s not sure it’s okay to feel sad, and I have to show it that we are safe enough now to deconstruct that script. I have to show it that it’s okay now to feel sad. And in the last two weeks, in return, it has shown me that I can and need to move slowly in order to make space for sadness to move through me safely. 

Even though sadness can be very hard and very uncomfortable, we all deserve to be able to feel it and learn from it. It is a great teacher. All emotions are. Blackout poetry is a great way to be with an emotion and hear from it, but it’s not the only way. Take a pause, get quiet, and then listen inside yourself, to your mind, body, and spirit, for any clues about how you might be able to show up for an emotion that you’d instinctively rather not show up for. What do you hear?