Sometimes It Rains on the Beach: Accepting Sadness in a World Obsessed with Feeling Good

Reflection. It is a favorite diversion of mine. Any New Year, or end of a trip, or random Tuesday can find me dusting off my past memories and polishing them until the gleam like new. And because I am an eternal optimist of the sunniest degree, those recollections shine even brighter when viewed through my sunbeam colored glasses. This treasure hunt in my soul is something that called me way before I found my way to blogging, but the blog has been a perfect platform on which to pontificate my Technicolor reminiscences. In the past, I have penned wordy ramblings on everything from my favorite memories of the year to my goals for the next year. Each post served as a marker for the year that had past and a positive proclamation for the year to come.  This year, my soul, and thus my keyboard, has been inexplicably hushed. I have waited for weeks for the familiar stirring to look back to whisper to me, but I have had nothing by a stony silence.

Ever the optimist, I have assumed that this unprecedented lack of reflection was simply an indication that there was no reason to look to the past. Perhaps, I reasoned, I had reached a level of maturity where I subconsciously understood that my focus needed to be on the future. *Note to self: never assume you have reached any kind of maturity. I actually spent the first few weeks of 2014 feeling all kinds of enlightened and self actualized because of my new found understanding of looking forward. I smugly congratulated myself for my free-thinking and thought towards the future while ignoring the past.

Three weeks into my smug, self-congratulation, not only did my keyboard stay silent on the subject of reflection, it stayed silent on every other subject. Scary silent. Deathly silent. And since I fancy myself a writer, running out of words or even the inspiration for words is the equivalent of that dream where you are running late and naked for the test you didn’t study for. If you find yourself perplexed by this creative dead zone, you can get in line behind my husband who regularly gives me the side-eye when I moan about my muse or whatever. But, if you are, like me, a creative being whose work is fed from within, I know you will feel the ache of a silent soul.

Whatever was stuck, I needed to unstick it. I needed to write and feel grounded, and feel grounded and write. One feeds the other, you see. There were all kinds of stories perseverating inside my stifled self, and they were reaching a threatening level of backup. It was a Writer Code Red. So, I went to the place where I most often find my muse-the shower. Don’t judge; it’s quiet in there.

In the quiet drone of the warm water, I confronted the truth I had been avoiding.

The reason that I didn’t want to reflect on 2013 is because it had been an arduous, difficult, sometime brutal year. My sunny self feels compelled to say that there were good, even great parts, but many,many things in 2013 had been soul-splitting hard. The details are too personal, and still too painful to really splay them out for all to see, but the ins and outs of the refuse of 2013 were nothing that I wanted to rehash. In fact, I wanted to, and had been desperately trying to skip over them entirely on my way to days that had to be better.

That was my mistake: acting as if pain had no place in my world and ignoring the sadness and loss as if it was an inhuman emotion.

Sadness and sorrow are emotions that tend to make people squirm. We don’t like it in ourselves and we don’t like it in others. We don’t like to let people see us cry. We smile and say we are fine, when we are breaking inside. In a world obsessed with feeling good, we treat any other feeling as an unwelcome interloper. I don’t think this is an honest way to present ourselves to the world.  I certainly haven’t been honest with myself in past few months. That lack of truth was the soul purgatory that not only blocked my creativity, but stifled my ability to look forward with any clarity.

That changes today.

I am using this space to honor my pain and remember my struggles.  Like parents do for their children, I want to simply acknowledge a feeling. I admit now that I have come through a season of life that hurt and was hard-a season that pierced deeper than I could imagine. I wish I could say that I believed that this pain had a purpose or that I learned some kind of deep life lesson from the process. I can’t. I’m not that mature, as I have already established. The most I can say is that I survived. The pain, the trials, the loss, they did not rob me of my ability to look forward and hope for what will be next.

More than that, I don’t have a pithy lesson tied up with a killer closing sentence. I am far too consumed with nursing long-ignored wounds to offer any kind of wisdom. I have known great joy. I have known great sorrow. If I am lucky, I will know them both again. If I am really lucky, I will be able to collect enough joy moments to fill me so that the sorrow will not consume me. And so the circle goes.