I Don’t Get Sad, I Get Angry
Actually, I get angry and I get sad.
Dear People, let me tell you a story. I am a college student going on 20, and I have had a share of pain like everyone else in the world (though, perhaps, less than most). However, for the last four years I didn’t valued sadness. In fact, I valued anger because I felt it could be directed towards good. This tendency came strongly to the fore when I started playing a sport and when I spoke to the male members of the team. Just last year, I remember telling one dear friend that, “I don’t get sad. I get angry.” Why did I lie, not only to others but to myself as well? The answer is culture.
For long I have noticed that people around me seem to believe that women are more ‘emotional’. I don’t quite understand how this is the case since, the last I checked, we were all humans with chemicals, hormones and a high-functioning endocrine system that responded and reacted to changes in the environment. Emotion seems to be as much a part of being human as is thinking and reasoning. Maybe we give the ‘I think therefore I am’ too much due. What I realised was obvious. Women are more willing to express emotions like sadness compared to men because that was accepted. Men, on the other hand, aren’t suppose to express sadness since anger was more masculine. Being ‘emotional’ was expressing ‘unproductive’ emotions like sadness.
When I said, “I don’t get sad, I get angry,” I was delinking myself from the ‘unproductive emotion’. The fact that I was a woman, made me only want to prove that women weren’t emotional messes; that I, despite being a woman, wasn’t one. I failed to see how these thoughts were glaringly patriarchal. By valuing anger over sadness, I was decrying a ‘feminine’ emotion in favour of a ‘masculine’ emotion mandated and even celebrated by patriarchy. I was trying to feel what a patriarchal system valued and in the process, I demerited and devalued what not only women but people in general feel, an emotion that is an inexorable part of being human. I disregarded a part of myself and others, and in doing so committed a violence in cahoots with patriarchy.
Sadness is something we all feel. And honestly, it has its benefits. The poet Kahlil Gibran says that he “would not exchange the sorrows of my heart
for the joys of the multitude” because “a tear to purify my heart and give me understanding of life’s secrets and hidden things.” Perhaps the first benefit of sorrow is that it focuses us to think about things and deal with things that bother us. It makes things that bother us visible, things that would have previously escaped our attention. Perhaps that’s why experiencing sorrow can also make us empathetic. It makes it easier to identify and mindful of what people are feeling and what they may be going through. And last, but not the least, sadness may just increase our capacity for joy. As Gibran puts it in another one of his poems, “Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?”
As to expressing sadness? It is perhaps one of the most strengthening acts. It demands us to be vulnerable, to override the instinct of self-protection. It requires us to face our fears and desires. As Brene Brown puts it, “you can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.” So I am tired of numbing sadness. I am tired of hiding it and thinking less of it. I am tired of doing so because I don’t want to be too ‘emotional’. I get angry, but I also get sad. And the sadness? It doesn’t just make me human. It makes me ‘me’.
By devaluing sadness, patriarchy is devaluing a emotion that leads us to reexamine ideas and reexamine life, and one that creates a space for both empathy and joy. So I regard my sadness as I regard anger. Not as inferior. Not as unproductive. But as meaningful and natural. And I regard my expression of it not as feminine but human. When a man feels or expresses sadness he doesn’t become less of a man. When a women feels or expresses sadness she doesn’t become more of a women. We all get angry, we all get sad. I get angry and I get sad.
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