Soft Skill: Sitting with Sadness
Sadness isn’t cute. It doesn’t send a calendar invite, or text “on my way,” and it definitely doesn’t wipe its shoes before storming into your living room. Sadness shows up like a dirty roommate who insists on using the last morsel of toilet paper and then having the audacity to ask you what’s wrong.
And yet, here we are. Sharing space with it and learning to sit with it without immediately trying to make ourselves feel better or rebrand our tears as *growth*.
I don’t know about ya’ll, but I was trained to treat sadness like a house fire. Grab the freakin’ extinguisher (aka to-do lists, impulsive shopping, you already know) and smother it before anyone notices. But sitting with sadness is more like learning to live with a flickering candle. It’s small and manageable, and becoming close with it won’t actually make you burst into flames.
Some things to remember about managing your relationship to sadness:
Let it pull up a chair. Not your favorite spot on the couch, definitely not the driver's seat, but just like the small, uncomfy chair that you pull out when you don’t have enough seats for everyone at dinner.
You don’t need to solve it, fix it, or even understand it! You just have to acknowledge its presence.
Lowering the lights can help you process your sadness. Sometimes your nervous system just needs quiet; it doesn’t need to be performative, but it can help your mind register that you’re safe to feel however you need to feel. (There’s a reason why sad girls hate overhead lighting)
It’s important to remember that there is a big shift between “I am sadness” and “I am experiencing sadness.” It’s like going from being trapped in the rain to realizing you can just stand under a bus stop for a while.
This is so much easier said than done…but try to resist the urge to fix it immediately! You don’t need to therapize yourself into feeling better, or turn your sadness into something productive (I mean, do whatever you need to do, we all love a little pick-me-up treat), but it’s also ok to just feel bad for a while without having to earn your way back to good.
Be patient, grief is not linear. You might think your sadness saw its way out of the door, but then 20 minutes later, it’s like “oops, forgot my charger!” Let it come back, because even when it comes back, you know it’s just visiting, not moving in forever, and you can coexist with your feelings without collapsing.
Sitting with sadness is a soft skill, but it builds patience, presence, and the ability to feel without fleeing. It helps us become tender and open instead of overwhelmed. And when you finally get back to the other side, you’ll know you didn’t run from yourself! You stayed, and sat, and breathed, and cried, and honestly, that’s not nothing.
A quick but important note:
If your sadness feels constant, heavy, or impossible to climb out of, or if you think you might be dealing with depression, this is absolutely the time to reach out to a mental health professional or someone you trust. Sitting with emotions is healthy; suffering alone isn’t. You deserve support.