Love is expensive when we can’t metabolise our sadness.

Love is expensive when we can’t metabolise our sadness.

Society teaches us to be positive, happy, good company. Sad people are often seen as a burden; a weight, a heaviness, something we would rather not sit beside. And yes, sadness can become stuck, and at that point it hardens into something like depression, a weight that presses on the people around us. But sadness, when it flows, helps us let go. It moves energy out.

I have spent my lifetime rejecting my sadness. Hiding my face. Swallowing my tears.

Recently I have begun to know a small part of me. A very young one. She formed sometime before I turned three. She has no words; she is simply sad.

This little one lives deep in the engine room of my being, protected by layer upon layer. Some of the layers arrive as criticism. Some as anxiety. They formed to make sure her sadness never moves through me, so I don’t feel pain again.

They do not let me feel her. More than that, they treat sadness itself as something that is not allowed. Which is strange, because I know intellectually that sadness is okay; my body still refuses it. Even when it comes, I quickly swallow it, or I make sure no one is watching and close the bathroom door behind me.

What my little part has taught me is that to love, to love unconditionally, is to know sadness intimately. To live is also to die. How can we know the expansion of love without accepting death, without accepting sadness, without accepting the letting go?

To resist is the opposite of letting go. To resist sadness is to deny love.

Loving you through all of it,

Tahl

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