Sunday, July 15, 2012

Processing the sadness

This is one of those nights when you can feel the tiredness invading your whole body and yet, there is no chance that you can fall asleep. Herman Hesse, one of my favorite writers says that nights like this one should be cherished. One who has never spent a night awake in thoughts, filled up with sweet sorrow, has never truly felt anything deep enough. 
In my attempt to cherish this night without letting my spirit crush and bursting into tears (because my defense mechanisms depart to some other unknown place after 1 am) I figured out that the most constructive thing would be to write a new post.

I bet you have had nights like this one too. I decided to write because I "accidentally" bump into the saddest songs on YouTube or end up choking from sadness while reading lines of  some book I'm reading. I am trying to process all of the sad emotions and guide them safely to the exit. Life is to short to be sad, right?
A great friend of mine told me not to run way from my emotions. She told me to feel free to express them. I somehow find it easier to put them aside and do some other things, such as planning projects, studying Greek, playing basketball...anything. Just not that one scary thing that needs to be done: introspection. 
For me- the very process of expressing them is hurtful beyond the imaginable extent.

This is one of those blog posts with no precise topic or function. I cannot even say that it is an attempt to create something original, artistic...Catharsis. Nothing more. But as it is the case with every other sort of cleaning, in this way too, I can't run away from the fact that the dust keeps falling again and again... Cleaning should be a repetitive process. And I never really liked cleaning. I do not like to process. I like to get over and move on.
Robert Frost says : "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
It truly does. The question is, how does it go on? Are there things that we can never ever get over? I am not trying to be pathetic.. I am just wondering. This is not the first time I had such nights...Of course I  had nights like this before... And I reminiscence being even much sadder and thinking how I was never going to find a way to be better, but somehow it turned out to be completely different. Universe has its own crazy ways. I read somewhere recently that we need to get used to not finding signs on life's most important crossroads. Everything will come to its place in due time. I just need to convince myself that I really believe in that. 

There are so many things left unsaid. 
So many things left undone. 
So many moments unfulfilled. 
So many places left unseen. 
So much of us left behind. 
And so much of us lost in fear.

Anticipation. I wish we all had a permanent prospective memory disorder and that we were programmed to think only about the moments happening now. I wish we couldn't anticipate the future. 
We wouldn't run away. We wouldn't let the fear interfere.

There are some things I can't change. I gotta learn to let go.
Sometimes one just needs to accept being sad as a healthy thing and let the time do its own thing. 
Process the sadness.