Anatomy Of Sadness.

“Remembering’s dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place. “The Past Tense,” I suppose you’d call it. Memory’s so treacherous. One moment you’re lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candy-floss… the next, it leads you somewhere you don’t want to go. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you’d hoped were forgotten. Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can’t face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren’t contractually tied down to rationality! There is no sanity clause! So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit… you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away… forever.” 

I think when you try and describe sadness.. its like waking up and walking down the stairs expecting it to be Christmas day. The excitement of the presents, the smiling faces of your parents waiting to see your face fill up with happiness as you run to open them… only to find that nothing is there. Nothing. A feeling of deep melancholy orchestrated with strings that never make a sound. It’s different from depression. The feeling of wanting to kill yourself usually isn’t there. You don’t want to die. You just remember things that haunt the room like a ghost. 

It feels like heartbreak.

Your bones feel so tired from your mind having to remember everything. Bleakness.. in a way. You are mourning for something, someone. An emotion of bereavement.. a sudden cut of grief. You don’t quite know what to feel. It’s the heaviness you feel in your eyes that remind you how sad you feel. The change in the tone of your voice. Low, cold and somewhat apathetic. But the differences between feeling sad and depressed is, you can laugh. You can suddenly ‘jump’ out of it with the essence of something that makes you happy. 

Whenever i feel sad, i like to read, write. Plan trips to abandoned buildings. See my friends whenever i feel i can beat social anxiety for a while.  

Though sometimes it feels like nothing. You just don’t know why. You try to think or somehow define the reason why you feel sad. But you find nothing. 

I find heartbreak can be many things.                                                                      

The betrayal of friends. The abandonment of family. The feeling of being ostracised. You feel heartbroken because you believed they cared. 

I had a severe mental breakdown during the last few weeks at high school. I was 15. Though the days after are a blur, i just remember  being ‘here’. I was 6 stone lighter and psychotic. I felt insane. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I just remember thinking ‘where are my friends?’ and it broke my heart.

I found the heartbreak of being abandoned, like the many houses i have been to, was the most difficult to live with. I will admit that i am heartbroken.

Whenever you start to feel sad.. when your energy is drained and you just feel miserable, you need to keep your mind busy. Draw, write, walk.  Take photos of the trees or the sunset. Reading is something that helps me. I like to imagine the characters inside my head. The voices, the colours. It’s a somewhat comforting distraction from the real world. 

ℭ.