Savoring Sadness

When we’re sad, some part of us wants to continue being sad.

 

There is something in sadness that makes part of us yearn for its continuation. It is the wont of extreme sadness to pick up some mantra — a line that touches us to the quick — and repeat it ad infinitum. The spurned lover repeats to themselves, “She never even loved me.” A person distraught by failure might grab hold of, “It always ends this way.” And like a sharp thing, they jab themselves with it over and over to bring forth the most pain.

Why do we do this? Oscar Wilde wrote, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, that “Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.” I believe many of us (men and women alike) “attack” by surrendering — that is, we use our surrender as a means to elicit a response from those around us. There is something of begging for help in our desire to prolong our sadness.

On a personal level, it can be quite freeing, even relaxing, to allow ourselves to surrender. It lets us put down, for a moment, the encumbering sense of responsibility that we carry with us all of our lives. Savoring surrender for its own sake is certainly another reason we seek to prolong our sense of suffering.

There is, as well, a personal gratification to self-pity. Sadness makes one feel innocent. There is no burden as heavy as the shame we carry for our own failings, and sadness often allows us to absolve ourselves for a time. The mind under the influence of sadness tortures itself with regret, but soothes itself with the natural absolution of self-acceptance. In admitting our own faults we accomplish both these things with one fell swoop: to hurt ourselves with self-reproach and unburden ourselves through atonement.

There is a general inertia to sadness. It is the case with every emotion that it changes the way we view the world with such a naturalness that we cannot imagine, for a time, feeling any other way. When sad, misery comes to feel as the most natural state, as if its discontinuation would mark some strange, new, and uncomfortable transition. Emily Dickinson likely described it best when she wrote:

Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there were

A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,

Its infinite realms contain

Its past, enlightened to perceive

New periods of pain.

Yet, the real blessing of intense disconsolateness — and in a bout of crying in particular — is that it seems to so often exhaust our capacity for despondency. Often, as our tears cease to flow, so too does the well of our anguish run dry. I’ve wondered if there isn’t a threshold above which sadness becomes so intense that it simply cannot endure, and that those most afflicted are stricken by a strain of suffering just strong enough to persist but not overwhelm. I wonder, also, if this instinct for riling and prolonging our own sadness isn’t a mechanism for in fact exhausting it. Perhaps we are built to wallow in our sadness for the sake of forcing out every last bit of what harms us.

For whatever reason, sadness seeks to perpetuate and quicken itself.