It Might be Time to Normalise Melancholy
To accept the presence of an underlying sadness as our reality
Photo by Alfonso Navarro on Unsplash
July 2 2020
Have you heard of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows yet? I wrote about it previously here.
This is just another reminder.
This is going to get emo quickly, but: this particular Dictionary may become useful soon. Hear me out.
Have you noticed the world atm? It’s a bit… yeh.
I’m an optimist. Mainly, because I have been lucky to develop what is a pretty unshakeable belief in an afterlife that is far better than the one we are currently living.
But, I also feel like things are about to get better in this world, fairly soon.
Why the melancholy, then?
Well, I’m not so sure that the world is about to get better for everyone. Perhaps even the majority of people. I could be wrong, and I would like to be wrong.
This #greatawakening that many people are talking about could well gain momentum, sweep us all up and lift us — probably metaphorically but I’m open to it being literally — into a new age of existence.
Or it might not. It might cleave our society into two, taking one half with it to a better place and leaving the other half behind in a place of chaos and confusion. Families, friendships groups, significant others split down the middle, potentially.
Again, only maybe. But it seems appropriate to consider this as a possibility, the way things seem to be going. Even if you are on the right side of such a splitting, how un-conflictingly happy can you really be about it?
So, despite being in as good a place personally as I can say I have been for a long time (it has been a while since I have delved into my emo music collection, which is the best indicator I have available to me), I felt compelled to go back and check my favourite aforementioned manual of melancholy musings.
Mainly, I wanted to see if my favourite words still packed the same punch as before. It hadn’t been updated in ages, so I wasn’t sure if it was still active, and wasn’t expecting to find anything new. But, praise be to the saviour of sadness, there was a fresh entry:
Agnosthesia n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
Well, that’s not exactly a ray of sunshine. But, still: oof. The dude who does this site truly is the master of describing all things morose.
I don’t think I’m quite there anymore, thankfully. Maybe it resonates for you, though? Maybe it touches some feeling you had that even the most basic of human experiences seem to have a struggle written into them at the moment.
If so, my observation would be that it would be entirely normal. There is much going on in the world — and much, from what I know, that is about to be revealed — to make us numb.
And this might be what sadness truly is. A numbing of a feeling we have once experienced, and have faith that we will once again reach, just not any time in a future that we can imagine.
It’s not negative as such — I am a firm believer that sadness is natural and unavoidable. It’s just a place that falls short, for reasons we seem powerless to change, from a height that we know is possible.
And so that’s why I say: it’s time to normalise this numbness, this sorrow, this sadness.
Not to succumb to it, or think that this is all that can be, or to shirk at doing the things will help lead us away from it.
But to normalise this feeling as a logical reaction to the world as it is, and as it could very well be in the foreseeable future. To understand that the constant urge to question the validity of that feeling is essentially gaslighting our ability to logically comprehend the world.
It might be time to make melancholy a reality. Take it from a self-confessed emo: it doesn’t mean you can’t still smile.