Earlier this month, I experienced a couple of different things; the stress of the middle of the semester, the stress of a busy schedule, and the blow of losing a years-long friendship — and publicly, at that. It wasn’t anything too major; no blow-outs in the street or anything of that nature. But it’s become clear to me that because of what happened, the other person and I can no longer be friends.
And you know what? It sucks.
Actually, It’s worse than that. It hurts, and pretty badly at that.
It seems weird to say that I was unprepared to be sad. But I was! I think that we tend to think of sadness only in terms of things that are very major — like a death in the family, for example. Anything else sort of gets regulated to the bottom of the pile, and while we can be sad about other things, that sadness can’t be debilitating — it can’t be anything lasting more than a day or two. And so with that mindset in place, I was shocked to realize that after a day I did not feel better, I was not “over it” and that I was still just as hurt as I had been when the incident occurred.
In fact, I might’ve even felt worse. I spent so much time and energy trying undo being sad, and trying to make myself feel “back-to-normal” that it ultimately made things worse. Emotions don’t just vanish because we want them to, and so all the things that I was feeling eventually worked their way out of me somehow. But I always felt that I had passed the time period for acceptable sadness — and so I’d just try to hold it until I was in private (which again, most likely made things worse).
But I started really thinking about what I was doing — why I had made my sadness so privately tortuous rather than sharing with the people I knew would care. I think that part of the reason I — and others like me — are hesitant to discuss their feelings is because of we don’t want to be vulnerable in front of others.
Vulnerability has a weird place in our society — you’re encouraged to be vulnerable with others, but not too much, and at the same time, someone who is too reserved can be perceived as standoffish or unwilling to connect. We’re all trying to find the balance here, and so it can feel like our more intense emotions — or the emotions that we have that aren’t fun to deal with — are burdens that we have to handle alone. But that isn’t true at all. I know that it can feel like you’re being a burden, or that what you’re feeling is too much to handle. But other people, the people that love you, that are concerned about you — they’d want to know. You can be vulnerable with them, and if you can’t, then they aren’t meant for you.
I think that this time has taught me an important lesson — it’s okay to be sad, and it’s okay to share that sadness with the people around you. Sadness doesn’t just evaporate overnight, or disappear when you apply enough force. Sometimes it lingers. Sometimes things are just....awful for a while. But that’s how life works — not just for me, but for everyone — and eventually, sadness fades just like anything else.
You’ve just got to give it time.
