SAD!?
I would like to live in a country that knows how to be sad. Let me restate that: I would like my country to learn how to be sad. Because sometimes that’s just what it is: sad. Not a happy happy Coca-Cola commercial, not a bad-ass revenge movie. Not a situation calling for blame, anger, and righteousness, or even shame, which can itself be a way of avoiding sadness and imagining power. Much of the time we’re simply powerless, it’s too late, and it’s sad.
Americans are masters of movin’ on, whether it’s down the highway or away from the sad. We are true believers in the sunny side of the street — but that leaves half the street empty during the day, and too-bright lights shining in our eyes at night. I realize that Freud is wildly out of fashion, but he had an insight that remains valuable: when something is repressed, it pops up as stinky boil, a toxic mimic of what’s being avoided. Push down sadness and it resurfaces as depression, anxiety, addiction, rage, etc., etc. We’re afraid of being sad, as if it would destroy us, yet it’s the avoidance of sadness that really bites us in the butt, and bites hard.
Let’s take the example of murder-suicide (M-S, always a welcome topic), which has — in at least one NIH study — been categorized as falling into three general themes:
… a) domestic desperation, b) workplace justice, and c) school retaliation. Cases in the domestic desperation theme were characterized by the murder of a family member(s) and were often underpinned by men’s self-perceptions of failing to provide economic security. Workplace justice cases emerged from men’s grievances around paid-work, job insecurity, and perceptions of being bullied and/or marginalized by coworkers or supervisors. The school retaliation cases were strongly linked to “pay back” against individuals and/or society for the hardships endured by M-S perpetrators.*
If these fellows allowed themselves to be sad, to simply experience the sadness of their losses and disappointments, perhaps they couldn’t muster up the ginormous quantities of moral outrage necessary to fuel — and justify to themselves — such killings. I get it that sadness is feminized, and that it’s considered way more manly to be a psycho killer than to cry. It’s time to let that go, America.
My current favorite definition of being an adult has to do with: (1) acknowledging that our actions affect others†; and (2) taking responsibility for that fact. As in, the buck stops here. Our work as adults is to not transmit what hits us. To metabolize and transform it, rather than pass it on. But we can’t metabolize what we don’t let ourselves feel.
So — You Go, Adult! Go be sad.
* “Men, Masculinities, and Murder Suicide” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594088/
† Here “others” refers to all beings, human and non, as well as the space between us.
