So, I have a confession to make…
This can make or break what we have but I just want to put it out there, still — Creating tragic daydreams was my favorite pastime.
The brutal and tragic it is, the better. I’ve always reveled in this sweet lullaby of sadness and I’ve always tucked myself deeply in the depths of despair.
This has been the way I live my life, and it was okay for me to do so. Until recently I’ve come to my reckoning. Someone recommended Bojack Horseman to me and I have been enjoying every single episode of it — laughed and cried a bunch. On the 10th episode of the 3rd season, Ana, Bojack’s publicist said something that really struck something within me.
“Don’t fetishize your own sadness.” — Ana (Bojack Horseman)
I was thinking, so am I actually fetishizing my own sadness? Or is it really just a genuine cry for help? I have come to a point where I read through my past diary entries, look through the Spotify playlists that I religiously listen to, and scroll through my one hell of a trash profile on Twitter.
Then I saw this incredible video of oliSUNvia on YouTube exploring the seemingly untouched spectrum of fetishizing sadness and delving into this odd desire to be constantly sad.
Just like Olivia, I have felt the same way growing up. I grew up actively listening to angsty rock bands, watching beautifully-painted “I’m-dying-let’s-fall-in-love” tropes in movies, and reading through the crestfallen fictional story about how a seventeen-year-old kid kills himself kind of novels. Ever since I read Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why when I was still in my 10th grade in high school, I became fully aware of this whole genre of self-harm, depression, and tragedy beautifully painted and ingested in fiction and art.
I wanna hear another sad song, something to tune out all these bad thoughts. (Melancholy Kaleidoscope, All Time Low)
Mental illnesses and sadness are frequently romanticized in the media, including music, television, and social networking sites like Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram — often limned as poetic. Kurt Cobain’s suicide note was even sold on a t-shirt.
Digesting these media that are immensely saturated in the aesthetics of sadness and how it was beautifully and interestingly portrayed, I found myself in an intense desire to be sad and to crave darkness. These types of media encourage us to masochistically indulge in self-pain. This is not entirely wrong, since sadness and mental health need to be talked about in our society and it’s fortunate that it has been in the spotlight for quite some time. But it led to the extreme glorification of sadness and depression.
Back then, I was extremely insecure about myself (I still am, but let’s talk about that in another article). I wrote a diary entry every day as one of my attempts to disperse my feelings and thoughts. And so, pre-teen Carizza made sure that her sadness was clearly translated into words.
After reading novels about sadness, depression, and suicide, I felt like I needed my thoughts and feelings to be aesthetically transcribed into my diaries, only then, it would matter.
I needed my thoughts and feelings to be beautiful because that’s the only time I saw society value mental illness when it was delivered to us in the form of aesthetic art. In fact, I thought that to be deep and introspective, I needed to be sad I had to be lonely and pessimistic to be truly enlightened in real life. — oliSUNvia
Growing up there’s this constant recurrence of oppressing thoughts of “I just want to be sad, I don’t deserve otherwise” and that “without sadness, I wasn’t as interesting”.
My satisfaction is heavily dependent on the attention and sympathy that people showered on me because I am sad. Suffering has a weird way of convincing us that it’s more real than any other emotion. And I felt like my suffering would be much more meaningful if it was worse than other people’s suffering. Because if my pain and agony were just the same as everyone else’s, then what would be the point?
Sometimes we become so attached to the battle of the illness that we don’t want to heal anymore because that battle gives us meaning.
I’d hate to use this as an excuse but I was young. I felt like I would be much more interesting as a person if I was constantly sad, and that I would be more introspective if I was okay and open when talking about death and depression. So I made sadness part of my personality traits. For years, decades even, I was sad. I gave consent to be in this long and seemingly endless pursuit of sadness for the sake of being sad and to quench my desire for self-verification.
Fast forward to today, when I’ve grown to be a 21-year-old woman, I realized that I still am what I was before. Man, I really am sad. After countless therapy sessions with Dr. Tan to manage my acute episodeof chronic depression, I still am sad.
What I realize is that sadness can be comforting. Once you get used to the feeling of misery and despair, stiffening your upper lips can seem hurtful. The ray of sunshine can seem to be blinding, once you get used to eternal darkness.
The aesthetics of today’s moral standards made being sad an essential part of what makes you interesting. It kind of subtly encourages us to indulge in self-pain for the sake of being sad, for attention. Think about it, songs about having genuine fun and that kind of poppy aspect in it don’t stand a chance in the billboard top 100 when seen against the angsty, authentic music that explores depression, anxiety, and heartbreak. In fact, bubble gum pop was often regarded as trashy and shallow, otherwise felt truly intellectual and creative.
What’s scary about this is that this attraction to the aesthetics of sadness can be addicting. Having this irrational commitment or obsession with sadness, almost like making it a personality trait, is a habit-forming deed that can potentially make you callous and makes the sadness incredibly attractive.
Going back to Bojack Horseman, Todd, his best friend, provided us a lens to look at things from the perspective of someone who’s close to a person who’s really into romanticizing sadness. In this specific episode, Todd says something worthy of chewing on.
You can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep doing shitty things, and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You need to be better!
This awfully long passage on how I was overly obsessed with being sad growing up is my reckoning poured out through words. I have taken comfort in crying in despair and purposely jumping over the cliff to get drowned in darkness, not knowing that this might affect the people around me. I asked my sister about it, about how she’s affected by my pursuit of sadness.
I feel like I can’t share anything “happy” with you because if I do, you won’t be able to relate to it and in the end, you’d just compare yourself to the thing that I was about to say. It’s just constant complaints of “I wish I could be like that too.” And it’s hard, seeing you like that.
The tragically beautiful and aesthetic melancholy movement has gone too far. This has made it difficult to distinguish between those who truly need help and others who are merely attempting to fit in with this dark odd trend. Going back to the question I first asked, am I actually fetishizing my own sadness? Or is it really just a genuine cry for help?
To answer this, I’d like to quote Kait Rokowski’s passage in Alight:
Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends, and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.
