Every April, when the days get long again and we shed our winter coats, I remember that I am an essentially joyful person and am, perhaps more importantly, committed to cultivating joy. This is the writerly way of saying I suffer from a low-grade form of seasonal depression. Seasonal Affectiveness Disorder (SAD) is estimated to affect as many as six in 100 people and is more common among women and in geographic regions like New England. When spring comes, I’m always surprised to watch the cobwebs clear from my heart like slush evaporating under the sun.
My seasonal depression, and a more ambivalent sadness, illuminates how our stigmatization of sadness stymies our larger ability to process and heal.
I’m thinking beyond seasonal depression to a time in my life when I became the saddest girl at the party. No matter my best efforts to remain upbeat, my face announced my misery like a siren. I’d get asked by friends and strangers if I was okay.
Eventually, I learned to leave the party early.
At the same time, I was deeply anxious about the hitch in my emotional life. By all accounts, my life was pretty incredible and I was ashamed to not revel in it more. So, I approached my sadness with my regular relentless attitude; I meditated daily, exercised three to four times a week, and yet, I was still sad, which compounded my frustration and, yes, my sadness.
Yet, feeling “blue” is a natural aspect of the human condition. What would it mean to look on these feelings without judgment and even as capable of teaching us?
Sadness makes us uncomfortable. Very early on, we learn to talk around it. We diminish, pathologize and suggest it will get better soon. Do we say these things because we believe them? Or is it because we’re afraid of bringing the vibe down and afraid to admit our optimism might be more socially incentivized than true?
Taylor Swift’s new song “I can do it with a broken heart” brags “You know you're good when you can even do it/With a broken heart/You know you're good, I'm good/'Cause I'm miserable/And nobody even knows.” On Spotify, this song is accompanied by images of Swift on her Eras tour, the highest grossing music tour in history. Her lyrics suggest ideal womanhood is not defined by the absence of pain, but the ability to marshal it in service of billion dollar profits.
Perversely, I began to love my sad drunk self. Like a ventriloquist's dummy, she gave word to what my sober self could not. During most of my waking hours I am a bubbly, compulsively friendly person with an affect that verges on a mid-Atlantic valley girl. There are lots of earnest compliments and “OMGs.”
At some point, I learned to present my pain through this vantage. I offered it up easily, but usually couched in the punchline of a joke where I remained the self-deprecating, forever plucky heroine.
The sadness wasn’t gone when I was doing those things, enjoying myself even, and welcoming her in felt like getting in touch with an old and familiar friend.
I’ll admit I probably entertain a friendlier relationship with sadness than most people. At the peak of my melancholy, I was lucky to be enrolled in the English department’s Advanced Poetry Workshop, where channeling my emotional storms was homework. These poems were nothing remarkable, but like a slightly more artful diary, they helped me organize my emotional reservoirs for other writing.
In the twenty-first century, melancholy is a feminized — which is to say delegitimized — emotion, and all genders are conscious of deflecting it lest they risk their participation in the arena of “serious” thought.
Essayist Leslie Jamison explains this “isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from the wounded affect — these women are aware that ‘woundedness’ is overdone and over-rated… they guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect.”
In the popular show “Girls,” roommates Marnie and Hannah yell “You are the wound,” at each other, because there is nothing more pejorative to the modern, emancipated woman than getting caught acting whiny.
Of course, we’re all “the wound.”
Like yours, my body is an inventory of wounds. There are the obvious ones (the scar on my right arm from leaning against the ballet mirror when I should have been practicing third position — I’ve always been a dreamer) and the ones that lurk below the skin — every major and minor heartbreak and the bones in my ankle that didn’t heal quite right.
Then in February something unexpected happened. In the mosh of a Winter Carnival party, crushed and elbowed on all sides, I was content. Furthermore, I couldn’t remember the last time a night was overturned by ambivalent melancholy. The simple explanation for the mood change is that my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) homework had finally paid off, but I prefer to think of it like passing along a lingering cold. The antibodies cleared my infection, and I was free.
I don’t know if I’m any better at expressing my low moods, but I’ve ceased trying to evaluate their legitimacy. Trying to out-think, to intellectualize emotional processes only exacerbates the wound.
Now that college is largely in my rearview mirror, I find myself thinking of all those lonely nights fondly.
Why?
This girl was no model of emotional health. She was selfish, melodramatic and in many respects missing perspective.
She was also honest: here I am, this is where it hurts.
Sarah Miller '24 (she/her) is an Editor at Large.
She previously served as Opinions Editor and Staff Writer. Miller is an English major on the Creative Writing track. She hails from Philadelphia and spent the spring studying English at Trinity College Dublin. She has interned for The New England Review and hosts a WRMC radio show where you can still listen to her many opinions.
