The Sadness
When we allow ourselves to absorb the brutality of the world around us, we allow ourselves to become more human.
I picture my sadness as little houses. Each house holds sadness of a different kind. Sometimes my visit is brief: I feel a pang in my chest, or I cry. Sometimes I linger there for a little longer, perhaps overnight. Other times, I lie on the floor while my whole body shakes as if there was something rattling inside of it, trying to be anywhere but here. I bury my face, trying to stifle the sensation that runs through me so violently. Nevertheless, I eventually bid farewell to the house, and I wonder when I’ll be back.
In this conception of sadness, there lies a tension between the external and the internal. Sadness is a place that exists outside of me – it is a house that I visit – yet at the same time, sadness is also inside me. It is the stirring that courses through my body in the form of a panic attack or a chest pang.
Glennon Doyle is someone who is all too familiar with this sensation and talks openly about it. Her conception of sadness is somewhat an inversion of mine: “It’s less of something that comes and haunts me, and more like I am the visitor and the sadness is a room inside of me.” She discusses the feeling of sadness in a recent episode of her podcast “We Can Do Hard Things.” Glennon and her co-hosts, Amanda and Abby, respond to a listener’s question about how to escape the self-hatred that our sadness often traps us in. In other words, how do we love ourselves in our darkest moments?
Glennon has a way of personifying her feelings (I’ve mentioned her theory about The Knowing that lives inside her before). In this episode, she personifies her sadness, referring to it as The Sadness:
“The Sadness is like a room inside of me…and that is where The Knowing lives. The Knowing of how beautiful and terrible and temporary and fleeting everything is…Lots of decades of my life I have spent just keeping [that room] locked…Then I started letting myself visit the room…Now, it feels like it is a room that I have emptied and I have put stuff from that room in every single other room of my inner home…the deepest existential woe is now in the Joy room, and the Peace and Comfort room…”
Instead of stifling The Sadness inside of her, or compartmentalizing it, she has allowed it to permeate, and interact with, her other states of being. The Sadness is a part of what it means to experience joy, peace, and comfort. After all, “a feeling depends on the knowledge of its opposite.” We cannot appreciate the sun if we don’t know the rain.
This episode was groundbreaking for me in the way it offers so many new conceptualizations of sadness. Here, I will discuss five takeaways from the podcast, including the ways of welcoming The Sadness, learning from it, and wielding it as a powerful tool for change.
The Sadness is not all blue.
“Sadness is not all blue. That’s too simple…Some of us are blue with sadness but it's got gold leaf inside of it.”
We often attribute the feeling of sadness with blue. But this feeling is too layered to be just one color. Yes blue, but blue with red (anger), and yellow (hope), and orange (anxiety). I think about my paint palette when I am moving oils around and mixing colors. I avoid the common mistake of mixing all of the colors together. Because if you do, suddenly the prism of colors you once had is a muddy gray nothingness. But if this is the case – that the dark, muddy color is the culmination of all the other colors — then so too is the darkness that envelops you when you are sad or depressed. Sadness is therefore the culmination of all the other colors (feelings) that make us human.
The Sadness is innate
“The Sadness exists in those of us who were born with an inner vision, who have a knowing, a feeling, a certainty of the way things could be, of the true and the beautiful. The sadness is the distance between the vision inside of us and what is visible to us on the outside.”
I have always felt things deeply. I transform practical problems into moral ones, I perceive rational concepts as a tangle of projected feelings, I am emotional and deeply sensitive to my surroundings. And when I am in The Sadness – or consumed by it – I cannot engage with the world as normal. I have been told that my disposition is contagious, that it engulfs those around me, that it clouds my judgment. As a result, I have come to understand that The Sadness makes me a difficult person.
But what Glennon suggests is that The Sadness is a gift that allows me to distinguish between what is, and what could be. The Sadness is a part of me; without it, I wouldn’t be me. Or, in Glennon’s words, “I wouldn’t know how to live without this thing that comes and washes me out sometimes.”
Glennon exalts The Sadness, claiming that it is not just a feeling, but a “Godness,” an awareness, a deep “paying attention.” She identifies the spiritual nature of being transfixed by your own pain, and your experience of paying close attention to the world around you. When we pay close attention, we see the beauty and the joy, and we also see all the deep delusion and disorder. This is a part of being human, and this is okay.
The Sadness is transformative — and dangerous
“The more I allow myself to live in that place [The Sadness], the kinder I am, the gentler I am, the more activist-y I am, the braver I am, the more things are clear about what matters and what doesn’t, and I become dangerous.”
It is dangerous to disrupt the quiet around you. That quiet is the perpetual state of productivity that our society wants us to remain in. To disrupt it is to disrupt progress, prosperity, profit.
When I am “dangerous” I am also controversial, and I push people away. I may even push away the people who I love the most. I will grieve those relationships that may be lost or indelibly altered. I will do so, however, knowing that I have gained more clarity as a result. I have chosen not to resist The Knowing, and instead accept what my gut is telling me and welcome the transformation that has yet to come.
Glennon read an excerpt from Rilke's “Letters to a Young Poet,” in which the idea of sadness is discussed as a means by which we prepare ourselves for some important change within ourselves:
“Please ask yourself whether somewhere, some place deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad…if only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches…perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys…for they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown, everything within us withdraws, and a silence arises, and a new experience stands in the midst of it all and says nothing…the quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us…and the more we can make it our own…and later on when it “happens” that is when it steps further out of us to other people, we will feel related, and close to it in our innermost being…if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and over everything you do, you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you…why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside of you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where is all of this coming from and where is it going?”
When we allow ourselves to absorb and respond to the brutality of the world around us, we allow ourselves to become more human. The Sadness mustn’t be quashed, suppressed, locked away. Instead, it must be met with a certain degree of reverence, because it is part of the journey to unlocking a change within us.
The Sadness is art.
“Here is why I love painting: because I am just feeling everything. These kindergarten paintings that I’m making are really not helping anyone…It’s just a place to stay human.”
Maybe we do not have the tools to change the world right now. Maybe we are sitting at home, painting, reading, and being sad, and it doesn’t feel productive. Glennon suggests that we don’t feel productive because we have internalized what society considers to be “productive,” and painting, reading and being sad doesn’t fit the bill.
“Maybe when you are in the sadness you are not productive, you are not shiny, you are not any of what the world tells you is a loveable self. But maybe you don't always want to be productive and shiny, maybe you don't think that is what it means to be human.”
Painting and writing is the means by which I process The Sadness and use it as my guide. It is my way of channeling The Sadness into something bigger than myself. I have crafted my own creative outlet that allows my feelings to pass through me and come out on the other side as something more beautiful. When I paint or write, sometimes I feel as though I am somehow bypassing the creation of something more meaningful. Of course, my paintings bring some people joy, but they’re not signing peace treaties or voting for legislation or blocking highways. But our ability to express ourselves — whether that is through art, or music, or a produce a complex web of code — is what it means to be human. That is something that we should cherish, not evade. Let’s make more art.
The Sadness is self-efficacy
“The people that have The Sadness can become warriors for truth and beauty and peace and love.”
When I am in a fit of rage or despair about the state of the world — the rolling back of human rights, or the unfolding of death and destruction on my phone screen — I am told to put my phone down, to take a break, to walk away, because I am not going to fix this problem today.
Amanda, Glennon’s co-host and sister, created this analogy that deftly describes the process of looking away from the atrocities of the world because we believe we have no way of changing them. We are told we “have no business approaching the fire,” and to just “let the people in charge of firefighting deal with that.” In this way, society manufactures our lack of self-efficacy, pushing us to avoid looking at the fire because it's not ours to put out. But if we feel the pain of seeing disturbing events unfold, and we do nothing about it, where does that pain go? Amanda described that process as one that actually dehumanizes us.
“If you’re going to [the fire], you are becoming more you. You are becoming more human. If you bypass it, it might be more convenient…but you are becoming less you, and becoming less human.”
Leaning into The Sadness can therefore embolden our sense of self. Amanda referred to AJ Muste, a lifelong nonviolent peace activist. During the Vietnam war, he stood outside of the White House night after night holding a candle. Many people asked him what good that would do for the anti-war effort, and replied, “I don't do this to change the country, I do this so the country won’t change me.”
Sometimes you look into the fire in private; you read a book, or you write something that you share with no one; “you’re just immersing and not looking away.” In this process you’re preparing yourself, so that “when the outside world invites you to take action, you will be ready.”