does my sadness make me interesting?
I think we have decided, collectively, without much debate and without much scrutiny, that sadness is interesting and happiness is not.
The sad person stares out a rain-streaked window with a cup of black coffee, a cigarette in hand, and bottles strewn artfully behind her, musing over her life. The happy person is at brunch. One of them, we’ve agreed, has more going on inside. One of them, we’d rather write a song about.
Sometimes I feel like sadness just has so much more weight to it. The aesthetics of melancholy pervade every instance of the human timeline. The ancient Greeks believed it was the humor of geniuses (black bile and such). The Romantics elevated it into a worldview. The Victorians made it fashionable. And we inherited all of it, through literature, through music, through a long unbroken chain of artists insisting that the dark end of experience was where the real truth lived. Where the real art lived.
You can’t really have the art without the suffering, can you? I know about Keats, coughing into a handkerchief and writing about it. I know about Beethoven, deaf and furious and composing from the inside of a silence no one else could hear. I know about Van Gogh (no more explanation needed there, I think). When I look at this, at all their suffering, I wonder how we decided that that was where the work came from. That that is what made them who they were.
Plath. Woolf. Frida Kahlo. Elliott Smith. Jeff Buckley. Basquiat. We tell their stories in a particular way, and the way in which we tell them, that suffering and greatness are always braided together, always inseparable, only suggests that you can’t have one without the other. That despair is the source. That without the bottomless, unsustainable pain, the work wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t matter or wouldn’t cut as deep.
Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. I hold both loosely. I don’t think it’s possible to know the answer. We can’t yet run a version of Van Gogh’s life where he gets the right medication and a support network, and see if he still paints Starry Night. It’s plausible that he does. Maybe he even paints something better. But who thinks of Picasso and remembers his Rose Period, warm and hopeful after falling in love? No, we remember the Blue, and it pulls me back to the same place: why do we find sadness so much more interesting than happiness?
Is it really that sadness is intrinsically deeper, that tortured poets and starving artists and melancholic people are just… more faceted? More interesting?
I’d like to disagree. I think that maybe sadness is just more legible, has better branding, gives people a place to put themselves.
Happiness doesn’t have that, not to the same degree. The happiness we’ve aestheticized is mostly the shallow kind, arms outstretched in a sunlit meadow, smiles all around. We try to render the real thing, but we don’t have the tools, and it comes out bland. And bland is boring. And boring doesn’t really matter.
I don’t think happiness is bland.
There is a happiness that lives right next to grief, enveloping the people you love that are still alive, and reminding you that underneath everything, this won’t always be true.
There is a happiness of a relationship that finally becomes honest, where the performance drops and something real starts between people.
There is a happiness in finishing something hard.
There is a happiness of a day so ordinary it somehow becomes perfect, where nothing happens, the world offers nothing remarkable, and yet.
There is a particular happiness that is almost painful, the kind that comes from realizing you are in a moment you will one day miss, and you are actually present, and you don’t know what to do with that except feel it.
These are not the same emotion. They leave different residue. We just haven’t given them the centuries of elaboration, the borrowed vocabulary, the wardrobe. So, they end up feeling inarticulate, harder to share, and harder to justify as serious.
There’s also (and this part is harder to say without sounding cruel) a real seductiveness to having your pain mean something. Suffering comes to me with an implicit promise: that it is in service of something, that it is making me more interesting, more textured, more real, more raw. That I’m earning something. Happiness doesn’t offer me that same deal. Happiness just is. It doesn’t argue for itself. It doesn’t demand to be written about. It is, in some fundamental way, content to exist without being witnessed.
Maybe we’ve mistaken that silence for absence, but I’m not sure. I don’t know if happiness is actually as rich as sadness, or if I’m just arguing for it because I want it to be true. I don’t know if the greats would have been the greats without the wreckage. These feel like questions that don’t have answers so much as positions you choose and live inside of. I just think it’s worth noticing which position we’ve inherited, and whether or not we’ve actually chosen it.