The Habit of Sadness

If you’ve read my book, you know I just moved to a new home about a year ago and that I left behind some pretty difficult circumstances, but I left filled with hope for a fresh, new start.

No matter the amount of hope one might hold, whatever flavor of trauma that visits us digs its ugly claws into our flesh in unique ways, leaving behind scars that become as familiar as taking a breath.

There’s a book that I watched sit on my mother’s bookshelf for years, called The Habit Of Surviving. I was a young woman at the time, not all that interested in books focused on trauma so I never read it, but the title stuck with me…habits of surviving. Habits. I always wondered what kind of habits help us survive.

Now that I’ve got a few more years under my belt, I don’t need to read a book. I’ve lived the life, and when I landed in my new home, I was running on coffee in the morning to get me moving, whatever worked at night to get me to sleep, and the habits of surviving to get through my days.

I was hopeful, but not okay. My body was a mess from the cycle of life I had just escaped and from sleeping on a sofa for almost 2 years. It was hard to walk; the pain when I changed position from sitting to standing excruciating. I could barely get up the stairs, and I started to wonder if it was smart to be in a home with so many steps to navigate. My exhaustion was so thorough I could not sit down without falling asleep. I was trying to unpack 20 years of life, help settle my kids into a new home and a new routine, and process all that had happened and what our future would look like at the same time.

I burrowed into the routine of setting up a new home and figuring out how to navigate a new city, and as the days went by, I healed. My body didn’t hurt so much. It wasn’t as hard to get up the stairs. I started writing again, finding joy in those things I used to love, before life took them away. Music. Cooking. Reading. Sleeping. NAPS! And finally, one day, I realized that I was at peace. Even more: a strange sort of joy had fallen over me like a warm blanket, wrapping me so tightly I couldn’t help but wonder if I was happy. If this was me, happy. If this was what happiness felt like. It was foreign. Odd. Weird, and then I realized that I really was deeply happy and that I had never felt this type of happy before, so I rested inside of its warm embrace and just let it flow.

All of a sudden one morning, I couldn’t get out of the bed. I wasn’t particularly sleepy; I just couldn’t find the will to get up and as I lay there trying to understand what was happening, I still felt the newness of that happiness emanating from deep within. I felt that inner peace wrapping itself around me. Neither of them were gone—they were deeply rooted, their growth displacing that lifelong companion of mine: sadness. And sadness, she was clinging to me for dear life, like a chain around my neck; like a drowning child holding onto whatever will help keep it afloat. Only she didn’t have a home inside of me anymore, so my rejection of a lifetime companion made me do odd things, like lay in bed all day crying even though I was truly happy and at peace.

It came to me one morning, as I struggled to figure out how to get out of bed again, that sadness had been with me for so long it had become a habit. It was what I knew. It’s what helped me make choices. It was what gave me motivation, because if I had something to be sad about and something to want to escape from, I had direction. Built in direction, without thought. Just get away from what makes you sad. It’s easy. It makes sense. It takes up all your hours in all of your days and without it? I didn’t quite know what to do. It wasn’t that I was sad, but that I didn’t know how to be happy, and these odd symptoms were my emotional habits fighting to move me backwards into familiar territory.

And so I let the tears flow. I made myself get up so that I wasn’t clinging to the landscape of sadness by lounging in bed all day with my head under the covers. I napped if I was truly tired. And I thought about all of the things I claimed to love and started doing them again, making note of what I really still enjoyed and what I was doing out of habit or forced to do because of circumstance. I decided that I would not surf through the rest of my life on habits—good or bad—but that I would move forward with intention.

I want to take a quick moment to say a little bit about depression. What I’ve described here was not depression. I’ve experienced that before, as many of us have. This was no emotional crisis; it was different—it was exactly as I described: I was happy. And I KNEW I was happy. It was brand new for me, it did not feel like I thought it would feel, and the dichotomy between how I thought happiness would feel and what it was actually feeling like was confusing. It left me in tears, asking myself out loud what was wrong with me that I was crying for no reason and STILL FEELING HAPPY?

It was very weird. Very annoying. Utterly confusing and I wanted it to STOP!

I say this to make sure you understand that *I UNDERSTAND*, and I hope that YOU UNDERSTAND that depression is real, and real depression is not something you can will yourself out of or shake off. You need to seek help in the form of community support, counseling, therapy and in more severe cases when you are maybe thinking about not ever getting out of bed again—hospitalization.

What I was experiencing was kind of like a grieving process. A letting go of what was and a figuring out of what would be. And so as I actively shook the grip of sadness; as I replaced that old, familiar habit of sadness with different types of activities and busyness and responsibilities, I slowly began to find joy again in the smallest of things. More accurate: I SAW joy rather than finding it. It was hard to hold on to. But it was there. And I knew it was there.

It was there.

It was a bunny rabbit hopping through the neighborhood on a walk.

It was the memory of my kid rolling down the hill in our new back yard two days after we landed here out of sheer happiness at HAVING a normal sized back yard for the first time in his whole life.

It was the gangster deer that stared us down fearlessly, daring us to come closer and disturb his meal.

It was the fireflies flitting across the front lawn on the 4^th of July.

It was the baby cardinal who landed right in front of me as I sat in meditation, singing and chattering to me for five minutes before taking off with his mama and continuing his flight lessons.

Our habits, you see, are without thought. Within intelligence. Their job is to keep us marching forward, one foot in front of the other, filling our days with activities we’re used to so we don’t have to think; so that we can just be and do and sit in what feels like productivity. But every once in awhile, we need to stop and question our habits. Ask if they are still the best way to automate our life. Wonder aloud whether a different habit might serve us better, or if it’s better to let purposeful intention step in for awhile and redirect our lives based on who we currently are and where we’ve decided to go.

And so, that habit of sadness? It’s not a habit, anymore. I’ve accepted that I’m happy, damnit, and even though that doesn’t look or feel like I thought it would…it IS. Happiness. And it’s here to stay.