Posted on Thursday, 05/08/25.

On being sad

My ability to write is, for whatever reason, coupled to feeling especially sad or desperate, meaning what is put down here is only a transient crisis.

Part of the irreality of the last couple of years must be related to that the few people I’ve loved mostly don’t talk to me anymore. Very little of this has been malicious, at least obviously. Alternatives are too numerous: time, distance, inchoate misalignments gone to seed. But because I have often kept to myself outside of these relationships, because I have moved every four years and recently quite far, because I think too often on things which could have been and thus am content to focus on only a few individuals for a long time, the decline in regular human interaction has felt precipitous. This leads to that feeling I have mentioned before of being ‘divinely cursed’——i.e., that this whole thing, when I forget that my asociality is long established, is basically deserved retribution for behavior and/or essential defects. This is made more complex and miserable by that I do actually harbor real and off-putting defects.

When people are consistently sad they are not fun to be around. Usually these people are also quite aware of when they are being tended to in-part to mitigate this sadness because it is ‘bumming out’ the other person. This makes the sad person more sad, because their sadness has metastasized, and because they see this quite clearly, and this paralyzes the muscles they should be kneading to get ready to try to become more independently interesting and thus admirable.

I am aware enough of the current entanglements of people I’ve loved that I can basically see that I am lacking many of the traits which could alleviate this contagious, sympathetic sadness well enough and soon enough. I am not committed enough to artistic pursuits against which being sad can be interpreted as ascetic suffering; I do not have a high powered job making stupid amounts of money against which being sad recovers a glaze of modern ironic cool; I do not even have the heart for the kind of really intense obsession for someone else against which being sad acquires the velvet sheen of tragedy.

I also lack the nerve to really bother these people about this; I haven’t made this very clear, but when I talk to someone outright about feeling sad it is only because it has taken over a truly frightening proportion of my day. Supinity. Head-banging-on-wall. Poor meals. Perpetual sleepiness. This is of course not the right way to communicate one’s feelings to others, because it must be true that smaller sadnesses are easier to mitigate than larger ones, but once again I have known too few people: am too aware that to speak of one’s chronic sadness basically euthanizes the other person’s ability to be totally comfortable and thus tamp their own sadnesses, and so on. It is all very fragile.

It really doesn’t feel like an impossibility to be alone for an extremely long time, these days. Or to eventually settle for piecemeal relationships (if I have not already) bound primarily against a fear of being alone for an extremely long time. This is another symptom of the cursèd aspect: the sense that there might actually be something common and endogenous and indelible that encourages people to give me attention for a time but then eventually stop providing that attention, stop deriving any sort of solace or amusement which would compel them to want to continue talking to me, etc. And that even if this defect were a MacGuffin or a hologram, existing more truthfully in these other people and only apparently or effectively inside of me, it would still mean that I have been too dumb or impotent to apply the proper salve to those other peoples’ wounds, which has to have basically the same takeaway lesson.

Whether by idiocy or desire, I have at times really believed that people have loved me, or aspects of me, and have felt my impulse to act quite seriously and earnestly underneath love’s penumbra. I am very pliable to what I perceive as the intuitive actions of others: very taken by them. I place otherwise inexplicable faith in the spontaneous action, or admission, or purposeful inconveniencing of oneself. Such acts make me believe things like that I want to be there with them, to give them what they want.

I don’t think that I want to understand everything all of the time, nor do I need to be loved and attended to constantly. But this all feels very impossible now, like that I have to start rectifying my soul, or autoclaving those parts of me which I had thought were pleasant but are in fact boluses of exhaustion. Because otherwise I am just living far away from everyone, making no money, producing nothing of practical or spiritual value——the process of arriving here is made to feel like a series of mistakes portending nothing. My daily life appears, when I am tired and sad, to contain no signs of having ever been close to anyone. There is no one even who can be shown (to them meaningless) objects and images which would in principle signify the importance of past relationships. I know, or have been told by distant sources, that such things are alleviated over time, in small steps, but what is the actual mechanism of this? If it were simple there would be no need for it, and if it were complicated then it must contain the possibility of failure.

This is some of the core of the feeling of irreality. My life, by whatever admixture of happenstance and errors of my own and the people I have been close to, appears to signify nothing. I don’t think that I mean that the possibility for a good life is gone, but that there are so few immediate ways for me to feel the reasons for and effects of my life heretofore that everything has gone quite flat. This flatness is the sadness, I think: like, that I do not even really get to feel sad about someone, or for something anymore, but am made to feel as though I am prohibited from normalizing states of mind and communication. This prohibition appears sometimes to have the shape of a universal physical law, rather than a command or a judgement, and thus is quite distant and inscrutable.

I imagine it has to get better: that beyond the daily fluctuations in my mood there can be changes of greater substance and durability. It’s just that it’s appeared so quickly, this aridity——that immediately from this I have to accept that the apparent quickness is so much more probably downstream of my own inattentiveness over years, from which it again has to be assumed, as there is no sign of otherwise, that I am no better better now than I have been at the sort of slow, nutritive observances that might ward off crises to come.