What Happens When You’ve Been Sad For Too Long

Sometimes I look into the mirror and ask myself “how could this happen to me?”

The last few years have changed so much. I’ve been subject to pain, depression, sadness and every form of agony that a human mind can experience. Life happens to all of us, but for some people it’s never the way we want it to be. A wrong turn here and there and you’re stuck in the labyrinth of sadness forever. And when the anguish surpasses the breaking point, there’s no turning back. You’re stuck with misery forever.

If you’ve ever felt the sense of grief as deeply as I have, you might agree that the aftermath leads to such consequences as:

It gets compulsive. After a point sadness is a sort of habit. You can’t really function without the empty ache somewhere inside you. Somehow, after you’ve been exposed to such an intense feeling of grief for so long it feels natural to exist with a tinge of lingering sadness. And it’s not like you don’t laugh or joke around, life is pretty normal except that there’s a customary sorrow that just won’t go away.

Everything seems a bit poetic. Yes, that’s one of the cool things. Being sad adds a touch of poetry to your life. It gets perfect when you’re in the car with the earphones on and a sad song plays and you stare out of the window feeling like a tragedy queen. But in fact, being sad is not poetic at all because in the end it only makes you feel like shit. It’s like performing in an empty theatre with no audience to watch you.

You become kinder. A person who has seen pain and sadness up so close can understand other people better. Most of the people so easily forget that others are human. But one only understands grief when you’ve felt it physically. That’s why I believe distress makes a person more humane. Sad people are kinder, more compassionate and forgiving. They care about other people’s feelings because they know how it feels when no one cares about theirs.

You become introspective. When you’ve spent so long wishing for happiness, you do tend to think more deeply about what makes you happy. And then you just think more deeply about everything. You also tend to overthink your decisions because you’re scared you’ll go wrong. You can’t afford another mistake and yet another regret.

You appreciate more. You appreciate the small things in life and see beauty where others don’t see anything. Most people just enjoy the music but a sad person understands the lyrics. For us, a rainy day and a good book are as close as we can get to happiness.

You become a creative person. It is the (to quote the cliché) last but not the least thing that happens to you when you’re a gloomy person. In fact, it is the only actually good part. All these years of misery that you have stacked away in your heart flows out through your creative abilities. Most of the time people don’t even realize it. You’re just writing or painting or singing or whatever to let it all out and eventually when you look back you created a masterpiece!

I guess, in the end we’re all a little sad. Some scars don’t fade away because they are the evidences of life, of the physical truth that you have lived.