So Sad Today - Melissa Broder Page 0,59

I had depression. The psychiatrist was like, Oh yes, you definitely do. I was like, Um, it would’ve been cool if you had said something to me before. I guess she thought I knew that when we spoke of my anxiety we were also speaking of depression.

I was still struggling a lot, particularly at work. But I did find something else that helped a little bit. When I felt like I was dying, I began tweeting anonymously from an account that I called sosadtoday. I was mostly tweeting into the abyss. I followed, like, three people who I had admired on weird Twitter but who I didn’t follow from my personal Twitter account. That was it.

But there was something about the visceral impact of sending what I was feeling out into the universe that felt different than just writing in a journal. It gave me relief. Maybe it was just the dopamine of hitting Send, but I felt like things were starting to move and clear out of me. Then people started following, in rapid numbers. The account grew and grew.

Then a really weird thing happened. I began to come out of my all-consuming anxiety and depression. But what I found was that there were always daily sadnesses to tweet about. I had never acknowledged this before, how sad things were. I guess I had always felt that to admit to myself that I was sad meant it was real. It made me feel like a loser. Who wants to be sad? But all of those sadnesses, unacknowledged over time, were pushing up against the Band-Aids I put over them. As anxiety and depression, they were screaming to get out.

As I mined my feelings for the account, which grew bigger and bigger, I felt like the opposite of a loser. I felt popular. I felt popular based on my truth. I began to celebrate this sensitive part of me—the things that I thought were most despicable: my need for constant validation, disappointment, feeling gross and fat and ugly. Also more essential things like, Why are we here? And what’s the point? The more real I was, the more people could relate. It seemed like there were a shitload of people who were scared of life and death, also people who were disappointed when they tried to partake in activities to cover over these fears and the activities didn’t work out, and they were forced once again to return to their primal sadnesses.

There were other Twitter accounts in this vein that seemed stupid to me. There were accounts where people were saying, If you’re depressed or sad, just get up and dance. That’s a crazy fucking thing to tell a depressed person. I felt that in the reality of what I had experienced, it was a lot more helpful to just lie there and share experiences with others who understood. What worked for me was to maybe make myself laugh about my plight, and through the grace of the Internet, make other people laugh.

The experience of being alive, its isness, maybe in relation to the future isn’tness of death or maybe independent of that, or maybe a hybrid of both, can hurt so much sometimes. Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die. I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt.

Why aren’t we all walking around and acknowledging this all the time? Maybe we can’t afford to. Maybe when we’re not in the fear and sadness, we run from it. We don’t want to think about it.

I know I have an ocean of sadness inside me and I have been damming it my entire life. I always imagined that something was supposed to rescue me from the ocean. But maybe the ocean is its own ultimate rescue—a reprieve from the linear mind and into the world of feeling. Shouldn’t someone have told me this at birth? Shouldn’t someone have said, “Enjoy your ocean of sadness, there is nothing to fear in it,” so I didn’t have to build all those dams? I think some of us are less equipped to deal with our oceans, or maybe we are just more terrified, because we see and feel a little extra. So we build our shitty dams. But inevitably, the dam always breaks again. It breaks again and the ocean speaks to me. It says, I’m alive and it’s real. It says, I’m going to die and it’s real.

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