Sadness: part 1 of a series

None of my friends have ever seen me cry. Maybe a teary eye here and there over an idiot boy or a sad movie, but they’ve never seen me sob. As someone with depression, sharing your sadness is difficult. You don’t want to burden those that care about you. You don’t want them to feel bad when they realize there’s simply nothing they can do to make you happy at this very moment.

Sometimes my sadness is alive and thrashing and gasping for air as I struggle to catch my breath because every cell in my body is consumed by feeling. Like I’m swimming in a riptide and barely keeping my head above water.

Sometimes my sadness is empty and hollow, it is a simple absence. I think that’s worse. If your sadness is crying and noise and salty catharsis, you can tell you’re alive. If there’s nothing: who knows if you are.

I’m sensitive to sad movies and books, I just saw a sad movie and I’m writing this with the lights off in my room listening to moody piano music. After I saw the Fault in Our Stars I was crying so hard I could barely drive home. When I had my heart broken I listened to “Stay with Me” by Sam Smith over 679 times. Sometimes I think I relish in my sadness, I think I feel it more than other things and maybe that’s why I write the most when I’m sad.

I used to think sadness and depression were artful, poignant, meaninful. Deep.

But if anything they ring hollow.