The Anatomy of Sadness

If you’ve ever seen me driving anywhere and I haven’t seen you (first of all you’re a creep, stop watching me when I’m not aware) but secondly, chances are you’ve witnessed me looking mad serious, singing to myself. Most days, good days, my drive home entails me rapping some Kanye West or caterwauling to Demi Lovato. This week however, has been a week where I’ve put on my melancholy playlist every day (entitled “Splinter Season”, the cover photo is Homer Simpson looking sad in the drifting snow) and cried the whole way home. While I work hard to be perpetually happy, this week has been tough. I’ve been struggling with the massive change my life is about to undergo, stress I could generally push through if it were just me feeling it, but some of my closest friends have been sad this week too, and I’ve been surrounded by a somberness that feels insurmountable.

You see, I’m a ride or die sort of bitch. You’ll know this if I’m your friend. I’ve ruined some friendships with the weight of my commitment, forcing my way into the lives of friends who just want some space. I’ve been banned from knowing the locations of friends’ first dates, lest I show up to encourage them. Because the fact is, I get too invested. People make their ways into my little heart easily and they stick there. From then on, my happiness is tethered to theirs. Seven days of this maudlin mood and I’ve been feeling like everyday is Sunday afternoon, bathed in that weird, dappled winter light knowing that all the good is fading from the world and it’s about to be cold and dark. It’s been a week of those tears in the shower where you can no longer discern between tears and shower water. But I’ve learnt some valuable lessons, and while I’m not going to say it’s helped, at least I’m moving mopily on, a more informed human.

Lesson 1: Our brains are out to fuck us up. One of my best friends is in a tumultuous relationship. It’s up and down. The highs are high, the lows are dizzyingly low and it consumes her for big chunks of her life. And I abhor seeing her trying to stop those little tears from sneaking out of her eyes and making their way down her well structured cheekbones. I’ve been there, and it’s the most painful thing in the world being in one of those relationships. The symptoms are always the same. Euphoria when you’re together. Near suicidal depression when you’re not, accompanied by the inability to sleep, or eat, or think straight. So of course, with my penchant for being right inside people’s heads, I looked up what’s going on in her head.

Did you know that when you’re with someone you’re attracted to and lusting after, you release dopamine, a hormone associated with feeling damn good (but also associated with addiction)? Did you also know that when you’re infatuated with someone your brain inhibits the mood stabiliser serotonin? Low levels of serotonin are associated with people who have OCD, read: low serotonin often means obsessive thoughts. Once this shit happens, you are literally unable to stop thinking about that person who made you release all the yummy dopamine. And as a bonus, if the relationship is stormy or sneaky, if you only see them unexpectedly and rarely or have an element of danger to your relationship, your stress hormone cortisol comes to the party. which makes you release more dopamine (hello increased addiction and euphoria). Finally, this whore known as norepinephrine is released, making your short term memories more poignant and wiring you so you can’t sleep and can’t eat. In the end you’re an insomniac mess, staring at the roof all night, unable to stop vividly reliving those amazing moments you shared, slowly descending into an eating disorder and with the worst case of the weeps you’ve ever had. Clearly our brains hate us, why evolution would do this, I do not know.

The overarching lesson here, other than some poorly explained brain chemistry, is to those of you who have a proclivity to go AWOL on someone who you’re in some sort of relationship with. Can you please stop, because it hurts a fuck-tonne more than you may realise. This isn't even about me and it's making my heart ache. I’m sure you don’t want to be a cunt, but heads up, you’re being a cunt.

Lesson 2: My natural instinct is to defend racists. While frantically texting my best friend from my hiding place in the bathroom about my regrets at being pregnant again, she offered to come and live with me and help raise the baby. Then, she second guessed her offer because the racism up here would be too much for her kids. She is Muslim and overheard an anti-Muslim slur last time she was in Leura (not from me, from a stranger). My immediate response was to defend the mountains as a progressive community of open-minded people, wanting to reassure her that what she heard was a one off. But then my mind traveled back just ten minutes, to when I’d seen a post on my local community Facebook page. A woman had taken a photo of a Muslim couple in Coles and was waxing lyrical about how this "scourge" was taking over the world. I’m assuming it was taken without their permission, as it was from behind a pole and how would that permission acquiring conversation even go? “Hi there random muslim shoppers, can you just reach for that soup and I’ll pap you from round this corner? I just want to be vitriolic about you to a bunch of other strangers on the internet.” Doubtful. The picture just looked like a couple doing their shopping, except the woman happened to be wearing a hijab, apparently striking the fear of (some other god) into this woman.

As much as I despise the notion of getting idiots to “imagine she’s your mum, your sister, your daughter” before we’re able to see women as human beings who shouldn’t be despised, beaten or raped; I couldn’t help but imagine that woman buying soup for (probably) her kids, was my friend buying Annabel Karmel’s fish pie as an easy meal for a Thursday night. How would I feel if it were a photo of her with some white supremacist bullshit about being scared, scrawled below it? Why was my first instinct to protect these people who are worse monsters than those they imagine invading our town? I guess my lesson here is that I overlook other people’s hurts to be self serving because I too, am a monster. And I’m sorry, and I’ll work on it.

Lesson 3: Getting what you want can make you sadder than you’d expect. The closer I get to having my second, and last, kid the more terrified I get. I wanted him. I meant to be pregnant with him. But the less time I have left in this little life I’ve built around myself, with the job I love, the friends I cherish, the body I worked so hard to turn into a fucking machine, the more devastated I feel that I have to give it all up. Soon I’ll be sitting on the couch as the sun rises, slowly tracks across the sky and sets, and still be in the same spot long after it’s down. From 5-7pm, you'll probably find me marching around my living room with a screaming child strapped to me, my life barely recognisable from what it is now. I know what’s coming, and it fills me with cold dread. I already miss the ferocity of basketball and running on my own out along Narrowneck on dizzyingly cold Saturday mornings, knowing the world’s mine. I miss drinking scotch on a Tuesday, if I so desire. Soon I'll need to stop going to work, the place and people that give me peace.

And so to avoid this impending doom, I’ve been pretending that I’m not pregnant. Which is why I ended up in hospital last week, after trying to climb trees at work when I was actually so dehydrated from the gastro I’d had for three days that I required four litres of fluid in the hospital by the end of the night. The nurse there got mad at me for not knowing my normal blood pressure and endangering my baby (who was completely fine, FYI). As is the case with pregnancy, I am no longer of concern. I am merely the incubator, an object of fascination or a fetish, the person who shouldn’t eat soft serve, deli meats, sushi, pre-washed salads, the cheeses I like, alcohol. People take heavy things from my hands like I’m a child. I neglected to tell anyone at the chainsaw course I attended last week that I was pregnant until I absolutely had to because I don’t want to learn your bullshit, special pregnant lady way to start a chainsaw, thanks Marty. I just want to fucking start it and rip some shit up (note: chainsaws are terrifying, please never use them unless qualified.)

I’ve been seeing this same quality in my friends all week; whenever we get something we really want, it seems to come served with a side of painful sacrifice. Some friends who’ve been searching for love finally have it and consequently have to give up their autonomy, freaking them right out. Other friends managed to buy the house of their dreams and set up the job they always thought they wanted, but it comes at the cost of their current life, which they love equally. So my final lesson seems to be that good comes with the bad and sometimes the bad feels like it outweighs the good, like those people who win the lottery only to lose all their friends and then go bankrupt because they spent it all on drugs and Star Wars figurines.

TL;DR of this brain dump: I've just catalogued the various sadnesses of me and my friends this week and the reasons I’ve been in a bit of a malaise lately. I’m lucky in that, for me, telling people about my various hurts is bloodletting, giving away a tiny piece of my sadness to everyone I know seems to disperse it. I’m sorry if I’ve made you bear the burden of my pain this week. Meanwhile, my friends are less forthcoming with their pain, only gleaned little bits at a time by my needling, so I’m sorry too if you’ve been one of the people I’ve tried to hassle into catharsis. Sometimes we can fix these heartbreaks but more often than not, we just have to sit with the pain and weather the storm together, and I’m thankful as hell for those of you who do that with me. But can we please do it with a drink in each hand and maybe four or so on the table in front of us come mid-October?!