On sacrificing sadness
This Valentine’s, we’re going to shift the focus a bit from happy = partnered and sad = single. As many of you may know and have experienced, it is possible to be in a happy relationship and to be sad or even sad about it.
Don’t get me wrong – these are mostly fleeting moments. “On sacrificing sadness” isn’t meant to imply that I always despairing over my good fortune. I'm so lucky for the joy my relationship brings, in its many forms.
What I would like to talk about here, however, is how being in a happy relationship impacts the bad. In my experience, any negative feelings about the world around me are much more surface-level and more easily dispelled. This can bring frustration on a couple of levels.
When I feel badly, you can lift me out of it just by making me laugh. How often do I get to feel profoundly sad and in touch with those emotions? They lurk and you chase them away; I’d like to get to know what they’re doing there.
If I cannot feel badly for long enough to be alone in it, how can I create anything of substance?
This second question nags at me frequently. I’m grateful to be happy and to have a constant support system. However, I spent a lot of my time in between relationships producing poetry. I grew to love the art form, having lost the desire to write long-form fiction as I previously did. It was snappy, emotional, satisfying – so different from fighting to meet word and page counts under time limits, checking constantly for plot holes and character consistency.
When my current partner came onto the scene, I was alone but not necessarily lonely. I spent plenty of time in my thoughts, staying up late to write and create. Now I go to bed earlier and have someone again to share most every thought with. I feel a drive to write but it’s an empty one, no force behind it, just a desire to feel that sense of satisfaction that comes with the final line of a poem.
Each day, I sacrifice the sadness necessary to do my best work. I feel bad for missing it. But, this has taught me also that fueling writing purely from sadness is a cheapskate’s way out. It takes much more work to draw deeper and from the world around you, from any frame of mind. That comes next.
Then again, my Valentine is moving away; maybe I’ll be a cheapskate again for a while.
