I’m a huge fan of Halloween. I don’t need a harvest festival, nor do I need the day replaced with musings of Luther nailing the 95 thesis to the door of Castle Church.
Nope, I just need me some candy, some hyped-up children, and maybe a costume or two to boot. Throw in a couple of other grown-ups to walk around the neighborhood or pass out candy with and you’d better believe this heralds as a most excellent day.
However, when it came to dressing up this year, I found it interesting that all I wanted to do was sadness.
The only thing I wanted to be was Sadness:
Sadness, of course, is one of five emotions in the 2015 Pixar movie, Inside Out. Sadness, as one stranger commented last night in the throes of trick-or-treating, is the glue that holds the movie together, for sadness teaches Joy (another emotion) that all of our emotions serve a purpose. And “when feelings are ignored, buried deep down, or not allowed to be expressed, they push back harder and create the potential for explosion.”1
I suppose this is why I most wanted to be Sadness: I wanted to be real with every feeling inside of me, even the ones (especially the ones) that feel negative and weighty, sad and depressed.
As a Seven on the Enneagram, I am prone to positivity, that much I know. But in unhealthy times of my life, I have erred so much on the side of positivity that I negated any emotions deemed negative to me.
I told sadness to go away. I told anger to take a hike. I told fear that there was no room in my life. Yes, I’m talking about the five central emotions of joy, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness (which are highlighted in the movie, but even more so, found within each one of our psyches), but I’m also talking about the single emotion I bet everything against: joy.
Joy, I reasoned, was the root of all happiness. As someone who found a home in the white, evangelical church for a good portion of my life, my wires seemed to have gotten crossed along the way, because for a long time, joy was the only emotion I deemed necessary to exude.
The joy of the Lord would be my strength! Jesus was my joy! I had the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart.
Whether I was quoting scripture, singing songs or belaboring aphorisms, joy was the central emotion of my existence. Joy was the single goal of my faith.
In the end, this proved rather detrimental. Anyone who’s lived through a couple decades on earth can tell you that shit eventually hits the fan. That hard things eventually happen, regardless of the joy you carry within you and exude to the world around you. And as Riley (of Inside Out fame) eventually finds out, if you don’t deal with the reality of the emotions rumbling around inside your body, an explosion eventually occurs. It’s all eventually going to come out, one way or another.
Whether I like it or not, I’ve certainly become acquainted with sadness over the years. This happens every time you move. This happens when death shows up on the other end of a phone call. This happens when pain upends the ones you love, and you too find yourself broken and bloodied by the side of the road, gnarled by injustice.
While I’m still not the best at, oh, I don’t know, crying at movies and books (try as a therapist once did to rid me of this by assigning me a weekend of Beaches and Terms of Endearment), sadness has become my friend.
Sadness is no longer avoided, but she is embraced. She doesn’t block the tears, but she lets them flow. She lets her mascara run, she lets snot run down her face.
She stops putting on a front, which is to say, she lets all of her emotions be a part of the bigger, larger, truer story.
And at least for me, on this day and in this hour, this counts more than anything else.
Sadness soaks in the tragedy in South Korea on Sunday and mourns alongside those who have lost their loved ones. Sadness laments the five communities2 confronted by school shootings last week alone (before anger starts to do something about it). And sadness grieves the aftermath of a divided nation, when we cannot take a stand against violence, less we be pitted with a single political party.3
Of these I grieve, I mourn, I cry out. But of these, I let sadness have her way in me, as she lets in empathy and shows me what it means to be a little more human.
What say you?
https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-purpose-of-emotions-as-told-through-inside-out#1
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/us/school-shootings-one-week-america-ctrp/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/01/paul-pelosi-attack-youngkin-lake/
I loved this reflection. As someone who only cries during movies, I was smirking at your tear-free Beaches watching!
Well, I was born on Halloween and I was on a bday getaway in the mountains with loved ones this weekend and Oct 30 was a hard day for me. Lots of sadness. Cried myself to sleep. And all the tears helped. My emotions on my bday the next day were way more fun and happy (with twinges of other emotions). I’m also learning to feel/honor all of them. 🧡