Pretty sure melancholy is my middle name.  Not by choice, as I know hanging out with someone who tends to be this way is not fun.  It explains why my favorite Winnie the Pooh character is Eeyore. I don’t think it’s feeling sorry for myself, it’s just a state of being. Sadness and melancholy are a part of life, but my personal struggle is in not allowing myself to go too far in my sadness.

Everyone has those times of course where you’re going through a really tough life event, a health issue, a family trauma, financial or job worries.  It’s a legitimate struggle and something that takes time and usually help to deal with.  What I’m talking about is that state of being, where you are just sad.  You can’t quite put your finger on why so you don’t know exactly how to deal with it.

I recently heard a speaker on this subject and she said several things that caught my attention.  First was learning to walk in my sadness.  How do I do life even when I’m feeling sad? For me that’s pretty easy IF I have something I have to do, like school for instance.  I can walk in, paste on that smile and do my job.  It’s those times, like this weekend when there’s nothing I have to do that I give in.  But learning to walk in my sadness is an interesting idea.  I’m allowed to be sad.  It’s part of who I am as a human being, so maybe it’s ok to give myself permission to feel it.  As long as I don’t go too far and start feeling sorry for myself.

Learning to walk in the dark is another.  Being sad isn’t a time to just stop, but could be a time to stop and think.  What am I supposed to be learning from this?  Is there something bothering me or scaring me that I need to face and deal with?  Are there sad things happening in other people’s lives that I’ve been absorbing and do I need to do something to help them to help myself feel better?  This one is particularly difficult to deal with because the sadness brings a lack of motivation to do anything more than get out of bed. I don’t want to leave the house and tend to do mind-numbing things like multiple screens, living life vicariously through them.  How do I keep walking through the sadness without trying to escape the darkness?

Bypassing Good Friday to get to Easter.  This was an interesting analogy.  So many of us are excited to celebrate Easter and the Resurrection with our bright Easter outfits and singing our celebratory songs that we forget or ignore the necessary darkness that had to be suffered through to get there.  Maybe it’s essential that we allow ourselves to be sad in order to fully embrace the happiness to follow.

The last week or so has been rough for me, mainly because I’ve felt so lonely.  This is in direct conflict with the idea that as an introvert I need to be alone in order to recharge my batteries, but being alone and being lonely are two different things.   And that darned introvert thing doesn’t allow me to ask someone for help, so it’s a bit of a Catch 22.  It makes it hard for friends as well as they respect my need to be alone and may not always know when I need them.

So now, how do I keep from going too far in my sadness?  I know that going too far can send me down a deep hole that’s difficult to climb out of and that’s a scary place.  I’ve tried stuffing the sadness in in order to function and I can tell you that doesn’t work either – it will eventually explode.  Maybe writing about it will help and for my friends who read it, I don’t to make a big deal of it, but if once in a while you might encourage me in my journey of discovery while walking through my sadness, I would greatly appreciate it.