The Capacity for Sadness

‘Tis the season for seasonal depression. When it sets in, I don’t sleep. When I don’t sleep, I lie awake at night and allow my mind to spiral. There comes a point where I lack the energy to resist it. I keep wondering if sadness is something we all carry in equal measure, like eyes in our skulls or ribs around our hearts, or if some of us are born with deeper wells carved into our chests, already prepared to hold more. Wells that don’t just collect rain, but swallow storms. I wonder if, given the right sequence of losses, the right timing, the right cracks already forming, anyone could sink as far as others have, or if there’s something uneven about it, something quietly decided long before we ever had language for pain. Like some nervous systems are tuned to hear grief at a higher volume, every frequency amplified, every echo lingering. Maybe for some people sadness is a puddle they step around, while for others it’s an ocean they learn to tread water in before they ever learn how to swim. I don’t know if depth is earned or inherited, if it’s circumstance or wiring, but I know that when sadness comes for me, it doesn’t knock. It opens a familiar door and settles in like it’s always lived here, like my body built the space for it on purpose and keeps it cozy with some tea by a fire.

I feel like I am always carrying an obscene amount of sadness… an excess, a surplus even. Some of it doesn’t even belong to me, but I carry it anyway. An amount that the human body was never meant to hold so it cracks under the weight, but is still holds it anyway. It isn’t situational or theatrical or even tied neatly to a single moment I can point at and explain. It’s just there, like a bruise under the skin that never finishes healing, a low-grade ache humming beneath everything, even laughter, even joy. I can’t remember a time that I didn’t feel it. On good days it stays quiet, like it’s being polite, but it never leaves the room. And in the winter it swells. Every winter. The cold seems to press it closer to the surface, thickening the air, shortening the days until sadness feels less like an emotion and more like a climate. And every winter I forget how heavy it gets, how my chest starts to feel crowded, how the darkness doesn’t arrive all at once but slowly, so slowly, until I look up and realize I’m already inside it again, disoriented, wondering how I missed the warning signs I’ve seen a hundred times before. I don’t think there will ever be a version of me that remembers this clearly once the light returns, once I’m breathing easier and telling myself I survived it again. But I know there will be a version of me back here, eventually. That’s the part that terrifies me… not the sadness itself, but its loyalty. The way it keeps its promises. The way it comes back every year knowing it never really left, it’s just been waiting.

Sometimes I wonder if being able to hold this much sadness is a skill, an unlisted qualification, or an endurance I never trained for but somehow earned anyway. Not a talent you’d show off, not something you’d ever admit to wanting, but a quiet stamina, like learning how to hold your breath longer and longer each time underwater. Maybe the people who can’t hold it let it spill outward instead, watch it rupture into rage, into recklessness, into hands that break things just to feel the impact. Maybe it leaks into numbness so complete it looks like indifference, or into other people, passed along like a fever no one wants to name. And maybe I carry mine inward because it feels safer there, because swallowing it feels like containment, like harm reduction, like choosing implosion over explosion. I tell myself this makes me responsible, controlled, strong… but sometimes I wonder if that’s just a story I repeat to make the weight survivable, to convince myself that holding all this grief inside my body is some kind of virtue and not just another way of disappearing quietly.

What if sadness is like taste buds that register the same thing in wildly different ways? A strawberry can be so sweet it feels like summer on someone’s tongue, and so sour it makes another person recoil, gag, swear they hate the fruit. The strawberry doesn’t change. It’s the same flesh, the same sugar, the same seeds. Only the mouth receiving it is different. So what if sadness works the same way? What if sadness isn’t calibrated by the event itself, but by the nervous system that has to metabolize it? Some bodies are already raw, already burned, already sensitized by everything they’ve swallowed before. For them, even a small grief detonates. For others, the same loss passes through with less damage, less residue. And maybe that’s why comparison feels so cruel, because we’re arguing over the fruit instead of acknowledging the mouths. We keep asking, Was it really that bad? instead of asking, What did it land in? What was already tender there?

We try to measure sadness anyway, because humans love to quantify what scares us. We love scales… one to ten, mild to severe, coping versus not. Doctors ask you to label the pain one to ten, as if pain will behave if we assign it numbers and tidy labels. But those numbers are a lie, or at least a language far too small to hold what they’re meant to describe. I’ve heard people say they’re at a ten while they’re standing upright, cooking dinner, answering texts, functioning in ways my body simply wouldn’t allow. For me, a ten doesn’t look like tears or silence… it looks like absence. A ten is unconscious. A ten is my nervous system pulling the emergency brake, my body shutting off the lights because staying awake with my thoughts would be dangerous. My ten was when my brother took his life. So why do we constantly try to decide whose ten is “correct”? And why do we keep pretending the scale means the same thing to everyone when our thresholds are built from entirely different histories? Maybe sadness isn’t meant to be compared at all. Maybe it isn’t a contest of intensity but a matter of capacity. Maybe some people are born with larger containers, thicker walls, deeper basins. Or maybe life stretches the container slowly, trauma by trauma, loss by loss, until it can hold oceans that would have drowned an earlier version of us, oceans we learn to carry, even as the weight bends us out of shape.

I wonder if someone can lose a dog and feel the same devastation as someone who loses a sibling, and the more I sit with it, the more the answer feels undeniably yes. Because loss isn’t measured by titles or bloodlines or the words we use to explain it to other people, it’s measured by attachment, by meaning, by who or what made life feel survivable. A dog might be someone’s only witness, the one being who saw them at their worst and stayed anyway. Their only constant. Their only reason to get out of bed. Their only safe place in a world that kept proving itself unreliable. Who are we to rank that kind of grief, to decide what counts as worthy devastation and what should be minimized or explained away? And then there’s the sadness with no name… the grief that doesn’t come with a story you can package neatly for dinner conversations, the heaviness that arrives without an obituary, without casseroles, without permission to take time off. The kind of sorrow that doesn’t have a clear beginning or an end, that just settles into your bones and lives there. Does that sadness have to step aside when more recognizable grief enters the room? Does it need justification, evidence, a death certificate? Or is it allowed to exist on its own terms, simply because it does, because it’s real in the body that’s carrying it, even if no one else knows how to name it?

Sometimes I’m sad for reasons I can trace with my finger, like following a crack in the sidewalk back to the moment it formed… loss, memory, absence, the obvious ghosts that announce themselves by name. I can point to those. I can say this is why, and the world nods, satisfied. But other times the sadness feels cellular, ancient, like it lives in my bones instead of my mind, like it existed in me long before any single event tried to claim credit for it. It feels inherited, preloaded, as if it’s been waiting quietly in my body for the right season to rise. Does that mean I’m broken? Or does it mean I’m honest about something most people learn to bury early? Maybe the real question isn’t whether we all have the same capacity for sadness, but whether we’re taught the same language for it… whether some of us are given words and space while others are taught silence and shame. Whether we’re allowed to feel it without footnotes, without proof, without tragedy as a receipt. Whether we’re allowed to carry it openly, or if we’re expected to set it down, smile politely, and pretend the weight wasn’t ever there at all.

All I know for sure is that I am sad. I am sad every winter, like my body recognizes the shortening days before my mind ever does, like something inside me starts bracing the moment the light thins. Even when I forget, when I convince myself I’m fine, that this year will be different because my circumstances are significantly ‘better’, my body remembers. It remembers in the way my chest tightens, in the way sleep turns restless, in the way joy feels farther away, dimmed but not gone. Maybe that isn’t a failure of resilience or gratitude. Maybe it’s the cost of being someone who feels deeply, who doesn’t numb out or look away when the weight of things presses down. Maybe surviving this way means staying awake to the heaviness, carrying it consciously instead of abandoning myself to escape it. And maybe that kind of survival isn’t pretty or efficient or impressive but it’s honest, and it’s how I’m still here.

And maybe, terrifying as it is, that sadness isn’t something to eradicate or outrun, not a disease to cure or a weight I’m meant to drop on the side of the road. Maybe it’s something I’m still learning how to carry without letting it hollow me out from the inside, without letting it turn me into an echo of myself. I think I’m okay with feeling sadness this deeply, even when it doesn’t come with a neat label or a socially acceptable explanation, because the depth doesn’t stop there; it reaches both directions. I feel love this deeply, too, feel it in my chest, in my breath, in the way my heart seems to recognize beauty before my brain can make sense of it. And maybe that’s the bargain: to feel one intensely is to open yourself to the other.

Love must be the counterweight. It’s the reason I’m willing to keep paying the price of feeling this sad. When I love, I don’t do it halfway or with an exit plan in mind. I love my people with a ferocity that rearranges my nervous system, the kind of love that lives in my gut and makes my chest ache when I watch them do nothing more than exist in the world. I love animals with a tenderness that feels like recognition, like we’re speaking the same quiet language of survival and trust. I love words, the way they crack things open, the way they give shape to feelings that would otherwise suffocate me. I love music the same way, like it’s a second bloodstream, like certain songs know me better than most people ever will. Loving is the trade-off. It’s the reason the sadness is allowed to stay. Because to feel this much grief is to be capable of this much devotion, this much wonder, this much awe. And if the cost of loving this deeply is that the sadness sometimes breaks me open, then so be it. I think I’m willing to live that way.