The Sadness I Carry

There is a sadness that some of us carry that we cannot always explain.

It is not necessarily connected to one particular event. It does not always have a name. Sometimes we cannot point to a moment in our lives and say, That is where it began.

We simply know that it is there.

We move through the world, we work, we laugh, we talk to people, we carry on with our responsibilities, and yet somewhere underneath all of it there is a deep sadness.

I know this sadness personally.

I have experienced it in a way that is not only emotional. I experience it physically.

There are times when I can feel sadness in my body. My fingertips become extremely sensitive. My toes can feel tender. The tips of my ears become sensitive. My shoulders can ache. There are moments when my entire body seems to respond to what I am feeling inside.

It is as though my body knows something before my mind can put words to it.

And sometimes I don’t even know what I am sad about.

I have wondered about this many times.

Is it something that happened to me?

Is it something I have done?

Is it something I have carried from experiences I have never fully understood?

Is it the accumulation of many small hurts rather than one great wound?

Or is some of this sadness simply a response to being alive and witnessing what happens in the world around us?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

What I do know is what I feel.

I see people who are hurting, and I feel it deeply.

I see anger.

I see resentment.

I see rejection.

I see people who have learned to hate themselves because somewhere along the way they came to believe that they were not enough.

I see people hurting other people because they themselves are hurting.

I see people building walls around themselves because they are afraid of being rejected again.

I see relationships breaking down.

I see people carrying wounds they don’t know how to talk about.

I see people desperately searching for love while simultaneously believing that they are unworthy of receiving it.

And when I see these things, something inside me becomes deeply saddened.

Not because I believe I am better than them.

Quite the opposite.

Perhaps it is because I recognize something of myself in them.

Perhaps the brokenness I see in another person reminds me of the places within myself that have also needed healing.

Perhaps that is why it hurts so much.

There is a strange kind of sadness that comes when you begin to see beneath people’s behaviour.

You stop seeing only the angry person.

You start wondering what happened to them.

You stop seeing only the person who rejects others.

You start wondering how deeply they have rejected themselves.

You stop seeing only someone’s cruelty.

You begin wondering what pain taught them that cruelty was necessary.

This does not excuse harmful behaviour.

But it changes the way I see people.

And sometimes that way of seeing the world is painful.

Because once you begin to see the human being underneath the behaviour, it becomes difficult to simply dismiss people.

You begin to see the wounded child inside the angry adult.

You begin to see the frightened person behind the arrogance.

You begin to see the loneliness behind the rejection.

You begin to see the longing for connection behind the walls.

And you begin to understand that much of what we see in the world may be the outward expression of something that has been hurting inwardly for a very long time.

That realization carries its own sadness.

I sometimes wonder whether the sadness I carry is partly the sadness of witnessing humanity struggle with itself.

We have so much potential for love, compassion, connection and kindness.

And yet we can be so cruel to one another.

More troubling still, we can be incredibly cruel to ourselves.

We punish ourselves for mistakes.

We carry shame.

We compare ourselves to others.

We tell ourselves that we are not worthy.

We hide our vulnerability.

We pretend that we are strong when inside we are falling apart.

And then, sometimes, our unresolved pain spills over onto somebody else.

Perhaps this is one of the great tragedies of being human:

We hurt because we have been hurt.

We reject because we have experienced rejection.

We become angry because something inside us is asking to be heard.

We distance ourselves because connection once became painful.

And the cycle continues.

But there is something else I have discovered.

Sadness can be painful, but sadness can also be an indication that we still care.

The fact that something hurts us may mean that we have not become indifferent to it.

When I look at suffering and feel sadness, I do not necessarily want to get rid of that feeling.

Sometimes I want to understand it.

I want to sit with it.

I want to ask it what it is trying to show me.

Because perhaps the answer is not that I am broken because I feel deeply.

Perhaps the sadness is telling me that I still have the capacity to care deeply.

And maybe there is a difference between carrying sadness and being consumed by it.

I am still learning that difference.

This book is not an attempt to explain why everyone feels sadness.

It is not an attempt to tell another person what their sadness means.

It is my attempt to put words to something I have experienced for much of my life.

A sadness that sometimes has no obvious beginning.

A sadness that sometimes lives in my body.

A sadness that becomes stronger when I see suffering in the world.

A sadness that makes me question why human beings hurt themselves and each other when, underneath everything, so many of us are simply looking for the same things:

To be loved.

To be accepted.

To be understood.

To feel safe.

To belong.

To know that our existence matters.

Perhaps this book begins with a simple admission:

I carry a deep sadness inside me.

I don’t always know where it comes from.

I don’t always know what to do with it.

But I have learned not to run from it.

I have learned to listen.

Because perhaps sadness has something to teach us.

Perhaps beneath sadness there is compassion.

Perhaps beneath compassion there is love.

And perhaps beneath the pain we carry is a part of us that still remembers what it feels like to care.

That is where my journey begins.

Not with an answer.

But with an honest confession:

There are times when I am deeply saddened by the world.

And sometimes, I am deeply saddened because I love the world so much.