When I’m feeling blue
Sadness has a way to make us slow down and listen
I ended the call and felt it spreading through my body and making a nest in my brain. Sadness has a way of creeping up on you.
*
I could feel it on the other side. It showed in the silences, in the words half spoken, deliberately chosen. It was not what I expected from a phone call to the Social Security services.
As I write this, Still Loving You, from Scorpions, starts to play, and the music slips through the waves.
The question I had was a tough one: I wanted to know what would happen to the money I’ve been paying to Social Security if I never got to retire (and I had to say the words - If I died before then). Social Security, in Portugal, is a kind of government insurance where you pay every month a percentage of your salary, and you have a retirement/pension plan, and get paid when you are on sick leave or out of work, among other things. This is not like a personal account; it is a solidarity system that distributes the money according to people’s needs; and I just had a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and I was not sure what my needs would be.
The woman on the other end was caught by surprise. I explained the situation and asked the question, trying to maintain a neutral voice, but struggling to make the words come out of my clenched throat. I had to stop and breathe a couple of times to get my voice back. She was tactful, I could feel her choosing the words. I felt her compassion, maybe it was pity.
I ended the call and did not let the tears fall. Tears sometimes make it better, sometimes make it worse, and then you wipe your face. I didn't want to be distracted by tears.
I felt the weight of sadness in my body, as if I had encountered it for the first time since my diagnosis.
I left the house and walked down to the beach. It was the first summer week with rain, and few people were in the sand. I sat in my favourite quiet corner, tried different playlists and stopped at the 90s Metal Classics. There was Sepultura, Rage Against the Machine, and Iron Maiden, and I let the guitars fill the spaces, trying to focus my attention on the waves in front of me, but I couldn’t stand still. I took out my phone and opened the document where I had been carving my sorrows, and I started writing this.
*
I don’t thrive in sadness, but she is an old friend. I have always been melancholic by nature, especially when I am left to my thoughts. I have been making time for it since I was a kid. I remember being maybe fourteen and walking down to the beach, in the winter, with my notebook, watching the waves, and listening to music on my walkman.
Sadness makes us slow down and listen. It allows time to add layers of thought to experiences, to evaluate that process, and to question it. It adds depth by tinting life with a shade of blue (remember the movie Inside Out?), but it can colour it very dark, keeping us down, gloomy, and antisocial.
I have read The Bell Jar, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, A Little Life, and The Book of Disquiet, and none of those books, where sadness and depression are a theme, are of help in keeping it balanced. When I feel it coming and don’t want to listen to it, I suppress it with numbness, finding a mindless task, reading or rewatching movies.
But sometimes I do listen to it, and that day, at the beach, it reminded me that there is more to this than just going through the motions, not because I believe there is a grand purpose for humans on earth, but because we are lucky to be alive on this random planet and we can choose how to grasp it.
On instagram: Expiration date in words