The Crash and Burn…
Just when I think I’ve finally learned to cope with my unyielding sadness in a healthy and permanent way, BAM it jumps on me from behind and drags me – kicking and screaming – to its dank, dark underground cave, cocoons me in webbing and hangs me from the ceiling to be eaten for lunch…
Despite my dramatic allegory, I am truly feeling bad.
My soul is sad today, even as I realize there is no logical or reality-based reason for this sadness. I’ve been dealing with being a woman of constant sorrow fairly well lately, in that I’m neither ignoring it nor dwelling in it. Today the sadness it is upon me like a shroud and yet, curiously, I am not lost in it.
In fact, I think I will be able to get out from under this gloom today. It feels lighter than normal, like a translucent neck scarf instead of a blackened lead garrote. I can see the other side of the sorrow; I realize it comes from an acutely remembered absence of joy. I understand that I am sad but that the sadness does not have to consume me.
Joy and Sorrow are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other and neither would exist without human interaction. I’m a “sorrow-side-up” type of person. I have had relatively little joy in my life, mostly because I have rarely allowed myself to feel even hints of happiness. Even now, I am fending off the unimpressed austerity I have traditionally used to deal with emotional pain.
I read something recently that seems very relevant here – in a Christian faith magazine I happened to look at while bored, surprisingly – wherein the author was talking about how human traditions cause more trouble for humans than any perceived evil ever could. I can’t say I identified with what the article was actually talking about, but I did glean this idea: my personal traditions cause me much more pain than they protect me from.The article referenced Mark 7 & John 8 as its proofs and sources. I admit I haven’t read any Bible scriptures since the last time I was translating them from Ancient Greek (2002, maybe?), and I wasn’t sure what those particular passages were talking about. So, I went and looked them up.
Essentially, in those chapters, Jesus was talking to the some religious guys about how their adherence to tradition caused them to act with hypocrisy. I can definitely vouch for this in the religious world, having existed under the tyranny of hypocritical dogma for the first 18 years of my life… However, I am intrigued in the clarity that these two passages brought to me. In Mark 7, Jesus says something like, “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come…” In John 8, Jesus says the famous, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone…”
What I learned from these two passages is something that I already KNEW but have had trouble consistently remembering: I am the source of my pain. I let my negative self-talk cause me heartache, even though I know those words and thoughts aren’t even based in truth. I am both the sinner and the stone-thrower, because I continuously throw stones at myself for every mistake I have made despite the fact that I already know I made the mistake and learned from it years ago. What I really learned from this small foray into religious literature is that I hold all the solutions to my problems in one simple realization: I need to stop beating myself up.
I don’t know when I’ll succeed, but I am definitely tired of having so much self-inflicted pain in my mind, heart and soul. I’ll figure it out somehow, in my own slow way. And maybe someday I really will learn to handle sadness without falling into it.