The duality of internal feelings is something that should be studied religiously. My thoughts of everyday actions and momentary priorities are intertwined with my reactions to my surroundings and can vary and change within a second of thought. The scenic drive to work fills me deeply with a sense of comfort in the snowy mountain peaks and fall leaves changing and descending onto the open roads. That serene feeling is quickly changed by the piercing honk of an impatient driver or the inconvenience of a yellow light I just barely had the time to run through. How quickly my feelings can change about the course of my day is alarming, and inherently dependent on one thing — how comforting sadness can be.
Where those inconveniences occur and make your day slightly more difficult and frustrating, comes a choice. To choose to look past the feeling, the cold shower you took this morning because there was no more hot water left, missing your bus by just a couple of minutes, or running into someone you didn’t want to see in the grocery store. Or, you can choose to dwell on the feeling, understand how that moment, interaction, or experience made you feel and sink deeper into it. Letting yourself marinate in the sadness, in the quiet, because sometimes that seems better and more comforting than working for unnatural positivity.
Now I understand how this sounds and the worry I’m sure you’re feeling in some way or another does not go unjustified. Though, I will advocate with all my power that sadness does not have to be an inherently bad thing. It’s merely a powerful feeling associated with powerful circumstances. The way a moth is never far from a flame, the moon from the sun, and the highest high after the lowest low. Sadness is not something to be afraid of or ashamed to feel. Sometimes it can be what is needed the most, and in my experience, something that can carry a sense of happiness in its trail.
The internet is a vast place to find this kind of emotional concoction. Consistent information from every corner of the world at your immediate disposal. With this kind of knowledge at your fingertips comes a sensitivity to being abnormal. A worry of judgment towards how often you wash your bedsheets or how many ounces of water you drink a day.
The choices you make, the friends you have, the relationships you nurture — all will be different from those around you. Within this, there’s a need to relate. To form a connection with the newest breakup album, regardless of relationship status, and to match the feelings of online reviewers you don’t know and have never met. The internet feeds into our insecurities but also breeds diverse emotions.
Snapchat is designed to target this exact feeling in its audience. Producing what seems to be a curated compilation of the cringiest pictures of yourself from middle school, the one really bad date you went on 2 years ago, and the one time you recorded yourself singing “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac because you wondered if you had what it took to make it big in the business. All of your best memories, worst experiences and pivotal moments with past and present friends and family in one spot. The unpredictability can be all consuming and, more often than not, hit you with the craziest memory when you need it least. But within that, beneath the pocket pictures and unintentional screenshots, a sense of longing for the past memories. Friends you don’t speak to anymore still live free and smiling behind the pixels of the screen, long gone pets and grandparents, family members and friendships live on forever in a digital storybook. The sadness comes from the joy of loving, the privilege and blessing to have something worth missing so much.
Sadness, like all other emotions, is a sign that you are alive. That you are living, breathing, surviving through everything, even the things you didn’t think you could. Hearing a stranger say something my third grade teacher always said, the taste of cheeseburger soup like the kind my friend from high school made before every band concert, the smell of my mom’s shampoo on someone at the grocery store. I am a mosaic of every person I have ever met, every song I have ever listened to, every sunset I’ve ever seen. So let the car behind you honk, let the yellow stoplight nearly catch you, and let yourself feel. Sadness is not always a bad thing. It proves you are human.