so i have been accused of being sad all the time.

and as you can see from my previous post, my first reaction was defensive: i’m not sad and pathetic, i’m happy and well-adjusted and my life is perfect, und so weiter. (side note: i am allowed to show off and use german words once in a while. especially when they’re such cool-sounding words. this is not pretentious, it is practice.)

anyway. the truth is, maybe i do like writing about things that are sad - not in the sense of tragic things like death and murder, but the things that confuse or intrigue or worry or disturb me. and now i think i know why that is. you know that ridiculously cliché Tolstoy quote about each unhappy family being different? when i was younger, i said the quote wasn’t even valid - that the sentence should read “all families are, in some way, unhappy.” (gosh i was a deep twelve-year-old.) but now i’m beginning to think what the quote is really saying is that sadness is interesting.  

everyone can be happy the same way, you know? we watch an episode of friends and we’re essentially laughing at the same joke. you see something pretty and it makes you go aaaah and you know that other people are probably feeling the same way. i know this is a terrible generalization and there are different kinds of happiness but what i mean is that sadness always feels frighteningly unique, something that’s just yours, in a way that’s different from happiness. songs that make me cry leave you unaffected. the weird building that’s been in the process of being torn down for years just fascinates me, but makes my friend feel awful because she says the house looks like it’s caught in limbo. sadness is strange: you can’t explain it and you can’t fight it.

i don’t always stop myself from feeling sad. so when i’m happy, i’m happy. and let’s be clear: i am happy, most of the time. but when i’m sad, i’m okay with admitting this to myself. because to me, being sad doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. it is a bad thing if you’re all self-indulgent and woe-is-me and the-whole-world-hates-me, but hey, if you’re watching an episode of Grey’s and you want to cry, just cry, you know?  sometimes i like re-reading The Book Thief or watching that heartbreaking episode where Ross and Rachel break up, or that scene with Keira Knightley in Love Actually, or listening to The Riddle (which i’m not sure why it makes me cry so much, but it does).

and i like writing about the things that make me feel sad or confused precisely because i also find them interesting. if i wrote about the things that made me happy those would basically be books, movies, music, people and the world in general. these are interesting too, but i always know when i’m happy why i’m happy - it’s only when i write down the things that make me anxious or unhappy that i realise the reasons behind these feelings.

 when you’re little, you’re taught always to smile, because feeling sad is bad - but when you grow up and learn that life isn’t always ideal, don’t you also realise that some amount of sadness is inevitable? life isn’t perfect, and i’d rather go through life knowing when i’m happy and when i’m not, than trying my best to suppress any unhappy feelings and living in a kind of forced happiness.