Being Sad Made Me Less Depressed, Here’s How
Without a doubt, being happy is something fascinating. In my times of reflection, I’m always impressed by the contrast between being happy and being sad, both at their extremes — for the better, of course — and the effect and impact that both have on us.
As redundant and obvious as it sounds, it’s not a pleasant thing to be sad; going down through life long enough outweighs being content for a little less. We sprinkle a little bit, and we perceive and realize that both sensations have something in common: they make us decide.
There’s a quote that I love from one of my favorite videogames ever — Bioshock (2007) — that the antagonist of the story says:
“We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us.” — Andrew Ryan
He couldn’t be more right about that. Lately, the debacles I’ve had in my life have been ones that I never believed would happen at the time and this has led me to reflect more — or rather — reflect better than I did before. From what I’ve gone through these last 5 years, I realized that being sad (considering that I suffer from dysthymia) lets me find a certain comfort and assurance in doing so, making me feel at ease, with a certain peace and even solace.
From there, my inspiration has come from continuing to write and regain my taste in composing music and even playing ever so slightly joyful more videogames, after a frustrating depressive episode I had a few years back. All this is to just be able to express myself as much as I can and be allowed to, in order to achieve what many of us always wanna find, and that is catharsis.
At the time I didn’t realize it — much less did I know it — but whenever I was saddened, I saw myself (and still do) in the urgent need to find an express rant in order to vent and cope with whatever I was dealing with (this is what I say to myself to something that I cannot resort to as therapy in the instant or if I don’t have someone around that I trust to talk to) and recently have been the things that have always satisfied me and that, due to depression, I lost the pleasure of taking up again, such as playing an instrument, listening to music and/or writing. The latter is the one that best suits and accommodates me.
I knew from all of that, that after feeling bad emotionally for a while, reflecting, I used that bad mood to now with ease and a certain kind of peace and serenity grab the guitar with greater taste and play for hours, or sit down to write or even be inspired by other things that I neglected for so many years like remodeling my room or improving my eating habits and so on.
Being sad has also led me to discover lots of great content that deal with both mental issues and psychotherapy for my emotions and feelings. Great way to understand more complex and emotional movies, read different books, and lots of great sad and melancholic music.
(I think that I’m in a great position to also recommend you some of the best and saddest songs I’ve ever heard, feel free to ask or if you do have other sad songs to share that’ll definitely have a nice impact on anybody, let me know for sure.)
It was only at the beginning of this year that I realized that I’ve motorized that feeling of post-sadness / melancholy and used it as a certain type of ‘weapon’ to combat the things that inflict on me the most and better control what I feel in the moment. It has made me someone who knows when and where to be sufficiently and necessarily reactionary about certain things and even in general. By that I came to an interesting realization: I now know how to empathize better with others.
By this, I mean that I also now know who to let go of when they empathize with me about whatever aches me emotionally and how to do it properly. The perspective changes for the better and has made me embrace kindly — or rather — not “sodomize” my negative emotions.
It’s accepting that not being ok is something awfully natural, that it’s normal, and that the ups and downs of this overvalued existence called Life led us to do things that may be above our consciousness. I think it’s the beauty of reflecting on what’s wrong about oneself: it’s perceiving the darkness, the gloominess and murk of the atmosphere that webs the whole thing.
It’s being scared, fear of where you can go by exploring your own sadness and when you take a glance at it you caress it, grasp it, and get comfortable in order to deterritorialize its characteristics that would strongly damage you if you let them go to the consciousness or to the good side.
And once you gain understanding of it and glide through it all, you make sure to use those to your advantage on the things you now know the damage degree and fight what does you wrong. By applying that scheme when I feel down, I tend to be more careful on what I linger on and what will embed to my countenance for days to come, so it has definitely helped me a lot to get around with it.
Getting sad has also made me, in a clever way (I think), become aware of the problems of others better and know to whom and what to offer a certain degree of solutions to what entangles them at the moment.
It’s to understand that using that contrast will have greater and better results on me and in others instead of nihilistically and solely suffering from melancholy because the spectrum of that is that it’ll be more difficult to leave that place, and we don’t want that.
It’s to augment, polish, and heighten the mentality, that it’s not necessary to psychoticize the depths of sadness, but rather to realize that thanks to it, one can become healthy or at least practice in the idea that it’ll be fine at some other point of our lives and the process, while kinda tedious and even abject, will eventually pay off.
By the way, I’m not saying that you should be sad and feeling all melancholic like 95% of the time, rather than being happy. On the contrary, this would be a great way to expose me in expressing that because whenever I do get sad, I now feel a more balanced peace, knowing that I can now treat some of the mental issues of the people that surround me as if I were treating a newborn baby, not in an infantile manner but rather a mature and delicate way.
Somehow, I’m now one with my emotions and actively understand them better and that has led me to feel a little less depressive on almost anything, even to the point of finding joy in both small and big things, overall positioning myself in a better state of mind.
It is still a long way of learning and unlearning about everything, but indubitably, sadness has been the motivation to prove to myself that I can and will get better, even to fail at something.
