I recently came across a list where someone noted the days they felt sad, in no particular order. Well, if I had to make a similar list, I would add July 16th 2023, April 10th 2024, April 17th 2024, May 21st 2024, May 22nd 2024, May 4th 2024, May 25th 2024, December 9th 2023, February 12th 2024, and probably many more days to it. They wrote, “It's ok to be sad and it's powerful to know that other people get sad too.”
When I was deep in the trenches of sadness, that sentiment was a lifeline. It was comforting until it wasn’t. Time passed, and my sadness wore off a bit. I forgot about it, or perhaps, I simply moved past it.
But now, looking back, I wonder if I had been feeling sad the wrong way. So here I am, with one pressing and persistent question: Is there a right way to be sad? Is there a guidebook that explains how to mourn the small and large losses?
I
The first time I remember being sad, I couldn’t tell I was sad. It was very trivial to most, perhaps, but to me, it was everything. I was four or five, I don’t remember. My mornings began with a ritual—a warm glass of water with lemon and honey. Three squeezes of lemon, a spoonful of honey, stirred into a glass of water. It felt like the morning sun in a glass. My father drank it too. To be like him, to hold that same warmth in my small hands, made the world feel right.
But that day, we were out of honey. My mother handed me a glass of Complan. It sat there, pale and unfamiliar. I stared at it and tried to gulp it down to avoid tasting it. But I couldn’t escape it. The taste was foreign, chalky, lacking the sweet tang of the morning sun. The taste of milk mixed with Complan didn’t sit right with me. I felt a sadness that I couldn’t name. The day felt wrong, askew. In that small kitchen, I felt a loss of a moment, a routine, a piece of my tiny little world that made it feel safe and whole. I think about it now, and it still makes me feel uneasy. Like something was amiss.
They say children develop their vocabulary to express their emotions between ages 3-5. Did I even have the language to express why the Complan made me feel so sad?
II
We are sad because sometimes the sun doesn’t show up for five days in a row. Because the world is often not a very nice place to live in. We are subjected to new horrors everyday.
Perhaps, one day, someone you love might just pack up and leave without warning. Or one day, you are the one packing up and leaving someone you love. Sometimes, you find yourself stuck in a job that no longer ignites a spark in you. Or you wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Or perhaps, much like the night I tried to write this, you are sad because you are unable to sleep. It could be a vitamin D deficiency too, actually.
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We are sad because things come to an end. You remember something that happened five years ago. "Mo money, mo problems," they say, but also "no money, mo problems." Sometimes, your hormone cocktail has you sobbing at a flower. You are reading a blog that has a tweet linked to it, and when you click on the link, it says the tweet doesn’t exist anymore. It could be dry hands with no hand cream in sight or a lost chapstick. Perhaps, there is a lost kitten that you can’t bring home. Or one day, you pay attention to the lyrics of a really upbeat song and realise that it is actually quite a sad song.
Sometimes, it is nothing really. Sometimes, it just so happens that you are really fucking sad and don’t fucking know why. You can be sad for a fleeting moment before the madness of life takes over, but other days it is so paralysing that brushing your teeth takes every ounce of your energy. Sadness sometimes stays for days and sometimes for minutes. It doesn’t adhere to a timetable.
Does the type of sadness have a correlation with the number of days it lasts?
III
Sadness demands catharsis. But what do you do when you hold all the sadness in you?
They say sadness is the catalyst for art. So, should I sit in front of my easel, get my water colours out, and start painting, creating the best work of my life? Do I become a full-time artist and writer, get a studio in Bandra, and go stare at the sunset at the beach every single day until the chemicals in my brain start to rearrange themselves to produce the happy ones? Should I write until I cannot anymore?
But sometimes, the sadness is immobilising. The sadness cannot be translated into action. The sadness required for creative output is not the sadness that paralyses but the ability to have experienced it, to have acknowledged it, but not fully processed it. The sadness that fuels creativity is the optimal level of sadness that makes you want to whip out your paints, your journal, your laptop. And sometimes, the most profound art we create comes not from trying to escape it but from allowing it to be a part of our story, a chapter in our journey. It doesn’t always turn into something grand or beautiful, but into something bearable. And that’s perhaps enough.
But, what do you do when the sadness is too much, when it suffocates instead of liberates?
IV
Happy things make me sad. The moment something good happens, I have to stop myself from running away from it. I have to stop myself from bolting in the other direction.
It's as if there's a part of me deeply entwined with sadness, a part that fears the unknown territory of sustained joy. Do I really not like being sad, or am I terrified that it has defined me for so long that I won't know how to function without it? Perhaps, on some level, I've come to derive a strange comfort and identity from this melancholic state, making happiness feel like a betrayal of my very self.
There’s a peculiar safety in sadness. It’s familiar, like an old t-shirt that’s frayed at the edges, with holes but fits just right. Happiness, on the other hand, feels like a new, unbroken-in pair of doc martens—exciting but uncomfortable, something that might not be mine to keep. What if it blisters? What if it slips away?
But what if this fear is holding me back? I have to ask myself: Am I afraid of happiness because it might vanish, leaving me more desolate than before? Or am I afraid of discovering that I can be someone else, someone who isn’t defined by sadness?
V
If all your energy is being used to survive, how can you thrive? Here’s where I got the sadness part wrong. I never allowed myself to be sad.
At some point in our lives, we're told not to cry. Sadness isn't seen as acceptable. So, the moment the blues hit, we scramble to fix ourselves. We're on a constant mission to patch up the cracks, to plaster over the pain. But maybe, just maybe, we need to give ourselves permission to survive first. To allow ourselves to feel the weight of the sadness, to let it wash over us before we can even think about taking action. Cry in the shower, cry in the back of an auto, cry in the bathroom at work—just let yourself feel it. Because here's the thing about sadness: it always comes back. Sadness doesn’t disappear simply because we ignore it. It festers, it grows, it waits for a quieter moment to reemerge, often stronger and more insistent than before.
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When you feel sad, let yourself be sad. Sadness is a part of the human experience, a testament to our capacity to feel deeply. To deny it is to deny a fundamental part of ourselves. The way I felt was exactly how I was meant to feel. No rules, no right or wrong. Perhaps sadness, in all its messy, complicated glory, doesn’t need to be managed or perfected. It just needs to be felt. Because tomorrow, you might go for a walk, or lift some silly weights, or you might bump into a fluffy dog in the elevator, and suddenly, the sadness isn't as heavy anymore. Everything will be okay, won't it? If not, here’s a button that will make it okay!