what to do with unexpected sadness

birthday reflections

Today is my 34th birthday, and while I’ll be celebrating with friends this coming weekend, I took this past Saturday to have a day to myself. My intention was to reflect, to dote on myself, and to celebrate the past year. I ended up spending most of that day in a deep sadness.

The theme of that sadness was a single thought that emerged with cutting clarity: I haven’t created anything that I’m truly proud of. The impact of this thought was immediate: an empty feeling in my gut, a twisting dread in my chest, and amidst all that, a welling surge of grief.

I was surprised by both the thought itself and the intensity of the related emotion. After all, this year was the year I ended my seven-year career in tech and went full-time on my own business. I own an apartment that I love. I’ve cultivated a number of good close friendships, new and old. I’ve written many essays and even a couple of books. And most importantly, I have a young cat who adores me. I love these things. I’m grateful for these things. I appreciate these things.

And yet, on Saturday, I felt only grief. My initial reaction was to want to “fix” that sadness; after all, it was my birthday, wasn’t I supposed to be happy? But as I’ve counselled many times before, I believe the most effective approach to intense emotion is not to dismiss it or try to argue with it, but to instead make space for it. So that’s what I did. I got curious about my grief.

My curiosity was rewarded. Some of the surface-level explanations that I thought I could offer for this grief, to explain it away, didn’t really seem to stick. Yes, there’s a part of me that expected to have a family by now. Yes, there’s a part of me that always wanted to write a novel at this point. Neither of those things have happened.

I thought those two pieces were part of the picture, but when I offered them as comfort to my grief (saying things like, “I understand that you really wanted a family”) that didn’t really seem to resonate. It didn’t really seem to move the grief. So I sat with it. I let it be there. I held space for it.

Eventually an explanation emerged, a deeper reason than all the above: Much of my life has been a performance.

I grew up in a family of well-meaning people who nonetheless had a hard time celebrating me for the way I am. I didn’t receive the affirmation that I deeply craved about who I am as a person. That’s no one’s fault, but it in turn led to this belief that I needed to perform a certain way in order to access love, belonging, and affirmation.

I’ve been aware of this performance tendency for many years and been painfully aware of it for the past couple of years. I’ve been working to release it. But a lifetime of performance tends to yield projects which are designed for applause. You end up with achievements that are designed to convince others of your worth.

The sad fact is that if someone doesn’t readily recognize my worth, there’s a good chance that they’re simply not willing to, no matter how much convincing I do. Or even if I do manage to convince them that I’m worthy, the validation that I earn feels hollow, because I know it’s conditional on me being a certain way. Either way, there isn’t room for my whole self.

Spread that over a lifetime, and I created the conditions for a life that seems accomplished on the surface, but not in a way that resonates deeply through every part of me. In understanding how deeply my need for performance contorted my life, I’m also recognizing the other path that I turned away from, the more genuine path, the path of following my bliss, the path of following what was meaningful for me. So of course there’s a grief there. There’s hope for the future, of course, and we’ll get to that, but there’s a grief to be worked through first.

From a young age, I wanted love. So I set out on a decades-long project to earn that love. Unfortunately, that didn’t yield the results I want. Putting that in context, it makes sense to be sad. It makes sense for that little boy who unconsciously engineered this project to be feeling grief and regret. My duty on Saturday was to hold that grief, and to fully feel it.

That’s what I did. I took myself out for a coffee, for a croissant, to multiple bookstores, and then for a long hike. I just let that sadness be there. I let myself grieve what I hadn’t created, as nebulous as that is. I let myself grieve who I could have been, if I felt empowered to follow what was most meaningful to me.

As a result of that intentional attention, the grief eventually passed. On my way back from my hike in the late afternoon, I felt a bubbling joy within me, an enthusiasm, a recognition that there was still abundant time left. I recognized that this project of turning away from performance and towards the genuine pursuit of bliss is exactly the thing that informs my work with others. There’s an alignment there, a symmetry. My reckoning with my grief and regret helps me resonate with those who are going through a similar struggle. That’s a blessing.

And also there’s a challenge here. If I’m not truly proud of all that I’ve created, what would I be proud to create? How can I step towards that? What is next on the horizon?

It is the paradox of the human condition that to look forward to that brighter future, I had to look backwards first. To release the grief, I had to go deep into it. I had to hold it. I had to let it be here. I had to give it permission to be here forever. To see myself clearly, I had to sink into the fog of despair.

I ended the day in a state of excited bliss. Okay, if I hadn’t yet created anything that I was truly proud of, what did I want to create? What would get me excited? If I fully leave behind the concept of performance, what does that empower me to do next?

The important thing here is that this excitement arose from genuine feeling. It wasn’t a “mindset shift”, or me forcing myself to think positively. It wasn’t me dismissing the grief or pretending it wasn’t there or trying to fix it. This outpouring of energy was a result of having met my grief at its deepest level. It came as a result of me looking my fear right in the face: Had I wasted my life? Only when I allowed myself to sincerely grapple with that question was I able to rise again to the heights of joy.

The result of this experience is over the past two days, I feel more excited about life than I have in a long time. I feel restored. I feel creative again.

I can’t help thinking what a loss it would have been if I had accepted the well-meaning advice of trying to be happy on my birthday weekend. If I had viewed my sadness as something to fix or escape, I wouldn’t have learned from it.

I’m 34 years old. I still have much to learn about this world and my relationship to it, but here is something I have learned, something I am truly proud to have learned: there is nothing within me that I need to be scared of. There is only one way I need to relate to myself, and that is with love and curiosity. As long as I can be patient, as long as I can hold space for what emerges within me, then there is no grief, anger, or fear that I need to run away from. I can simply be, and that is enough. There is no performance necessary.

Today is my birthday, and I am happy to be here, and I am excited to create what I’m going to create, and I’m happy to have you, dear reader, along for the journey.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

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P.S. Here are the books I bought on Saturday, and a picture from the top of the hike.