I am sadness, and sadness is me

cancer new moon, inside out 2, and the complexity of our emotions ♡

“Are you sure you can’t make it today?” I text.

“Fever, flu,” my best friend replies, checking things off her list. “I feel a headache coming on. I’m sorry babe,” she said. “I really wanted to watch this with you.”

That was how I ended up in a children’s theatre at 12:45pm on a Wednesday afternoon, for my first solo movie date in years.

The film?

Inside Out 2.

15 minutes in, I was bawling my eyes out.

I forgot what it feels like to be wholly immersed in your lonesome, with only your emotions for company.

---

---

Inside Out 2 is a movie about emotions. It is told through the lens of Riley, a 13 year old girl on the brink of puberty. That should tell you all you need to know about the state of her emotions 😂

It feels fitting that I watched it ahead of the Cancer New Moon that graced our skies this past weekend. Cancer rules, among many things, our emotions and our relationship to them. In its unhealed expression, Cancer is moody, cantankerous, defensive. Pinchers up and engaged.

In its highest expression, Cancer is the Great Mother. Able to hold space for all that is and will be. Creation is the ultimate act of vulnerability, opening yourself as a channel for something to be birthed through you.

Pay attention to what comes up this weekend.

What is aching to be born anew? ♡

I’m a Disney girlie. Always have been. Grew up on a steady diet of delulu™️ and Happily Ever Afters. So of course out of all the Inside Out characters, I felt like I resonated most with Joy — the way she paints everything a saccharine golden glow.

At one point, one of the other emotions accuses her of being delusional.

“Of course I’m delusional,” she yells. “How else am I going to put up with all of you complaining all the time!”

Same, Joy, same.

So imagine my surprise when a friend messaged me on IG that my teary-eyed photo (that I shared above) reminded her of Sadness.

“You look exactly like her,” she mused.

I sent her the photo to Photoshop for a laugh. The result was hilarious.

It got me thinking:

I think I’m Joy, but in reality, I’m Sadness. 💙

---

“Most writing comes from sadness. Rarely does writing come from happiness. Not because we don’t like happiness, but precisely because we all know what it is. This is Tolstoy’s “happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — only in sadness is there variety, color, depth, and things worth talking about.” —

Sherry Ning

---

Perhaps it is my Sadness that augments my Joy. 💛

Gives it meaning.

After all, when Joy was going down into the Memory Pond, Sadness asked if she could come along.

“Of course,” Joy said, smiling, hand outstretched. “Wherever I go, you go.”

Making friends with Sadness

Whenever I think of Sadness, with her big watery eyes, I can’t help but think:

Weak. 💔

I was raised to be strong. Self sufficient. I had no time for Sadness.

I had a startling moment of clarity when I was 10, when I was told we’d be moving out of our family home into my grandmother’s attic, where there’d be a brand new bunk bed for me and my sister to share, but we won’t be seeing Daddy again for a long time:

Yay, bunk bed. 🛏️

I knew what it meant. I knew that my life was getting blown apart.

But I didn’t have time to process it. To mourn. To say goodbye to everything I’d ever known and loved.

So I packed my emotions into a box along with everything else, and ran with it.

I think I’ve been running ever since.

These days, tears come a lot easier. I can hold space for myself to cry now. I hold grieving rituals. I try to honor my Sadness.

But there is still some part of me that thinks of her as Weak.

That I don’t want to be defined by her.

And when I look at my life, and how beautiful and vibrant it all is now, I notice how often I try to run away from her.

How I try to fill my time so there are no lows. No lulls.

No chances for Sadness to creep up and say hello.

But in a quiz my friend made me do, (in which I got Sadness as a result, too), Sadness is associated with Empathy and Compassion. 🥹

You need to have known grief to access the true depths of your humanity.

I’m getting tired of trying to outpace my Sadness. There is no where I can go, no pace I can run, that can bring me far enough away from her.

Because wherever Joy goes, Sadness goes, as well.

I am both Joy and Sadness.

All the time. 💙💛💙💛

And that thought is both terrifying and comforting all at once.

This time last year, I wrote a poem to my paternal grandmother right before she passed away. I called it ‘hands, holding’.

---

hands, holding.

---

This year, I am watching my maternal grandmother wither away into nothing.

She is my last remaining grandparent. 🥺

She turned 100 last year. I never had a very close relationship to her. But as she nears the end of her long, illustrious life, bits and pieces of memories are coming back to me:

How we would all sit at the dining table after school, me gangly and awkward and missing my dad and my childhood home and everything I’d ever known, learning to rebuild a new sense of normalcy.

a rare sunday lunch from today

How her dining room still transports me to a different, simpler time:

Where family wasn’t pain and trauma and things to be worked out in therapy,

But simply to be enjoyed.

Quiet Sunday afternoons in.

Meals around the table. Cards. Laughter. Belonging. Home.

This Cancer New Moon, will you take some time to think about all the ways in which you have built a home for yourself? Now, and before?

I am learning to honor my Sadness. My sacred softness within.

I am learning to honor my Ancestors. The lineage of women before me.

I am learning to hold space for All of me. The pain. The joy. The grief. The beauty. Because that is all true in life, isn’t it?

I’m so happy I chose to watch that movie alone, because it taught me the ultimate Cancerian lesson of all 🦀 —

No matter where we go, there we are.

Might as well learn to embrace it.

Enjoyed this piece? Give the ♡ a tap to help it reach more people. Love you!

Thank you for reading! I have a special collaborative interview coming out later this week, I can’t wait for you to read it. This is also the last week to join us at the old annual rate (20% off). Until then, sending you so much love :) — Gwen