Sadness

My dad phoned this morning to tell me he is there for me if I need him.  While we were talking he asked me if I was running away from things right now.  When talking to him, I said maybe a little.  When I started to really think about it, I realized I am not running away.  That is why this is so hard.

What I am doing is learning to make room for sadness in my life.  There is nothing wrong with feeling sad.  It is a normal emotion, but it is one that I have never made room for.  I have always just ignored it, even when the situation called for it.  I never wanted the attention on me, so I always said I was fine.  When people are dealing with their own things, this answer passes by.

The truth is though, I am sad.  I am sad for things I have lost.  I am sad for things long since gone and sad for things that have happened recently.  I feel like I have lost so much in so many ways because of the depression.  This makes me feel sad.  I have never really grieved the loss of people or dreams or innocence in my life.  I feel that sadness now also.  It is overwhelming.  But it is important.  I won't ever be able to really feel sad about current stuff until I deal with the old stuff because it will otherwise always feel overwhelming.  And so, I feel very sad these days.

The thing is to let myself feel the sadness, know it's ok and then find a way to deal with it.  Some things I will always feel sad about, but they are not things that I am going to think about all the time.  Right now the sadness is big, but very little of it is about the here and now.  Dealing with the big sadness should let me focus again on the here and now.  Learning how to feel sadness, learning to make space for it in my life is so important though.  There will be other things in my life that make me sad.  I need to make space for that and not ignore it.