sharing sadness as an act of liberation
Today was a double dose of some poopy stuff. Found out I wasn’t selected as a finalist for a competition I had entered. Finally realised I won’t be travelling to study this year; to meet up with people who feel like family under the wing of a teacher I admire greatly.
I am not asking for sympathy but I want to tell the story of my sadness.
Why am I saying this? Because I spend time most days with people who are sad. For these people, this sadness creates shame. Because what these kind, sad people tell themselves is that to be sad is to be a failure.
Surely we are mature enough to understand that sadness is a fact of life. That human existence will always contain some sorrow. I think intellectually we can hold that belief but our psyches understand something quite different.
We live in a white supremacist culture that would have us strive for perfection. This culture would have us produce and be seen as successful via financial reward. This system requires us to be nice rather than truthful, to weaponize the failings of others to protect ourselves and cause us to hide mistakes rather than learn from them. We are supposed to be happy and productive, never tired or resting or sad.
This white supremacist culture is one in which we are taught to hide our very human experience because the structure of the culture is itself inhumane.
According to orthodox white spirituality, when bad things happen it’s our fault. The bible talks a lot about sin and punishment. Those roots are deep in western thinking, so deep that the more recent outcroppings of spirituality, such as New Age thinking, contain a reworked version of that, sin requires punishment paradigm. The Law of Attraction which was vaunted as the truth a few years ago, has literally had people tell a friend of mine that cancer was her fault.
Maybe it’s part of our desperation to feel in control but the harm this thinking does is profound. We spend a lot of time wanting to find blame for sadness, for not being “on top of our game” “winning” or somehow eternally happy. We learn to treat sadness like a problem. We can’t be sad because to be a worthy person is to be happy. Our happiness and our worthiness are inextricably linked.
We have to perform happiness if we aren’t living it because to be without it is to fail. That failure, that awful thing that has ripped happiness from our grasp and left us isolated and ashamed must be our fault. We are well trained to tolerate the taste of our own sadness as we try to chew it down to leave only a vapid smile and “It’s all good!” in our mouths.
When we look around and see social media threads manicured to within an inch of their lives, hear ‘I’m fine!”, see each other pushing through tiredness and heartache with a smile on our faces, we think that’s what we have to do to.
But in my work I see how this cultural insistence on “Happiness as the only valid state” crushes people’s hearts. I see how the sense of failure attached to feeling sad or uncomfortable or lonely, crushes a soul.
I see how we are weakened by this insistence on happy. I see how it stops us learning to tolerate, cohabit with sadness or discomfort and how this makes the experience of being human so much harder than needs to be.
Imagine how much harder it makes being a human capable of change.
In order to build impetus to change we have to be able to face our own ugly truth, tolerate the discomfort that comes from seeing our own culpability in patterns of harm making. White supremacy survives in part, because of our incapacity to tolerate anything less than happy, productive and perfect.
I want to normalise the presence of sadness. I want us to be more generous with ourselves and each other so that we can see models of surviving sadness, failure, weakness. If we do this perhaps we can get better at resting. Better at tolerating our own discomfort. Better then at seeing our own complicity with harm-making and at uncoupling from white supremacy.
I think it’s a loving act to normalise sadness, uncertainty, discomfort and fear. It’s also an act of liberation.
“Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause — the cause of liberation.”
― Paulo Freire