So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
—Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of being a Wallflower.
In my culture, sadness is mostly treated as a trivial matter. You are not supposed to be too sad, you are not even supposed to nurse it all; life goes on and you shouldn’t get stuck at one point.
So, whenever I’m sad, I try to console myself with the fact that someone else has it worse somewhere. How can I be sad over being denied my favourite snack when someone else has just lost their dad? I try so hard to compress a supposedly overwhelming feeling. This reminds me of Charlie, the main character in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It reminds me of how much he tried to make his feeling of sadness look small in the beginning of the book but… it didn’t save him from sadness. It didn’t drive away sadness because sadness is made to be acknowledged.
Most times, we try to talk down on our sad thoughts but that doesn’t help. It only nurse this feeling and breeds it into a new garment. Acknowledging the feeling of sadness is the first step of letting it go.
Have you ever wondered why people rave about sad arts more than happy ones? Have you ever wondered why sad movies, books, and songs get more recognition?
No, it’s not because they are more interesting. It’s just that it gives people the room to cry over the wild and painful emotions that they have been holding so close to their heart. Thoughts they have refused to acknowledge. Thoughts they think crying over will make them weak.
We treat sadness as something to be avoided. As if it is bad to be felt. I’m a victim of that— I abhor writing while sad (and a lot of other things) but… sadness shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s part of our life, it should be embraced.
At the end of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie is faced with the truth as well. He realized that it doesn’t matter if someone else’s sadness is worse, but what matters is acknowledging his. The worst feeling ever is letting others talk down on how sad you are. Like it’s a kind of sadness competition.
I don’t know if any of this makes sense , but since it’s a thought that wants so hard to be written, why not?
At some point I paused and laughed at myself. I know I’m a cry baby. I laugh a lot too but I just realized that I have a lot of bottled up sadness which makes me cry whenever I encounter the slightest source of emotion like seeing a sad movie.
Thank you Sasha❤️