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There’s Nothing Wrong With Being Sad

Anger Tells You To Fight, But Sadness Tells You What To Fight For

I’m a sad person but I also don’t like the way that sounds because it sounds unmanly and embarrassing. When I was a little boy, my greatest social failing was that other boys could sense that I was not enough of a boy. I liked to talk more than I liked to fight. I cried when something hurt my feelings. I used my matchbox cars to act out musicals. None of this is manly. Anger is manly. Even depression carries with it a dark brooding nature. “He is depressed.” People might say. “He spends a lot of time alone. He is deep.” But I don’t really know the difference between depression and sadness. I only know that I have been sad for as long as I can remember having feelings. I used to joke that I had a permanently broken heart. Like it just happened one day when I was a child and it never healed back. Them’s the breaks. Tough titties, as my mom used to say, smiling and patting my head whenever I suffered some mild disappointment. Forty years later, the phrase still makes me laugh. WTF are tough titties?

Even though I’m pretty sure it’s true, I stopped saying it, because I stopped being able to stomach the pity and alarm I read on people’s faces when I spoke the words. It seemed to make some people want to heal me, to take me on as their own project to fix up and bring joy to. As if their lives could not stand if my sadness continued, as if the healing of my sadness would…