How I’ve learnt how to embrace moments of melancholy (and how this has changed my relationship with sadness)

I want to start this post with the very clear disclaimer that I’m not making light of mental-illness levels of sadness or hopelessness – I’m more so referring to a more niggling, yet benign, whole-body reminiscent sadness that sometimes overwhelms emotional people like myself.

It’s not exactly a mood representing reminiscence for anything in particular, it’s kind of this strange longing for things to be simpler and this weird, existential feeling of everything not really making any sense. Does anyone else get these ‘melancholic moments’? Well I do, and whilst they’re most definitely transient, they do make me feel pretty wildly uncentered for a day or two afterwards.

I am a bubbly person (undoubtedly so), but sometimes, it just gets to be a lot of work to maintain the aura of positivity that my personality-type entails. I remember growing up and knowing that sometimes I would just wake up and not feel like being ‘myself’ – I never really got my head around those days, and why they were so…. Sad. They were filled with this seemingly unnecessary amount of self-reflection and this uncanny urge to do nothing, listen to emotional music and think about my life decisions in excruciating detail. Sounds dramatic – and in reality, it totally is.

But… what once was a ‘weird day’ I’d feel ashamed or guilty about is now a once-monthly (or so) ritual that kind of just makes up what I figure is the norm for how life must just work.

Like, we’re all a little emo sometimes, right?

Happiness is there to be enjoyed as a contrast to non-happiness – and I guess majority of non-happiness for an anxious person like me is stress (lol), but also – sprinkled in there – there is always going to be sadness. My dad once told me that our generation is so scared of being sad and alone, and that this was somehow a “bad thing”. I never got what he meant until I tried essentially cuddling my sadness and accepting it for what it is.

My heart breaks for the cruel things I’ve experienced, and also breaks for things I wish I could experience but am worried I never will. My mind wanders to worlds and lives I wish I could’ve entered but am too scared to.

And very frequently, my flaws show themselves to be more glaring and more debilitating than usual.

This is all normal and fine.

If we didn’t long for things we didn’t have, we wouldn’t need to do anything with our lives, right? Even living life leisurely requires the longing for a life of leisure.

Sadness is that longing manifesting as a feeling of emptiness or melancholy that we, as adults, need to start feeling comfortable with. When we’re uncomfortable with it, sometimes it makes us feel like something’s missing, when largely, it’s not.

I know that I lose track of this a lot, and I’m impatient and scared and need to gratify myself with happiness much more than I think is humanly possible, but that’s not reality. I’m starting to think it’s not how these bodies and minds that we’ve been put on earth in are supposed to work. We need reflection and sadness, it’s normal.

Revel in it. Listen to the sad song, have the cry.

Remember it’s transient, but necessary.

xo mielz