I am a Susan Cain fan. I’ve recommended her book Quiet to countless people. Quiet was her anthem to the unsung introverts amongst us and now she is at it again — this time for the melancholics. In her book, Bittersweet, she heralds those of us who cry at commercials, get goosebumps multiple times a day, and feel frequently both deep sorrow as well as rapturous awe.
I instinctively knew that she was describing me in the Introduction, but I had no idea how much until I took her quiz and scored off the charts. I don’t consider myself a sad person, but I am definitively what she terms a happy melancholic - a phrase the author uses to describes herself as well. I gave the quiz to a bunch of my friends and family and it turns out that there must be some genetic component. I remember listening to story of The Little Drummer Boy on the radio when I was about 12, and finding that all four members of my family had retreated to different rooms to have a quiet boo hoo. My brother and I even now routinely send each other videos to make each other cry.
So, enough about me. I simply love the idea that there are a bunch of us wandering around who are so easily touched by the sorrow and longing of the world. So to define bittersweet, it’s useful to think about the 4 humors that Greeks used to describe temperaments: sanguine (or happy), melancholic (or sad), choleric (or angry), and phlegmatic (or calm). She doesn’t go into this much, but with each of these tendencies, there is a spectrum between healthy and unhealthy. At its healthiest, the melancholic temperament feels sorrow deeply, but also experiences love and gratitude acutely. She contends that there is no way to pull these pairing apart - love/loss, light/darkness, longing/disappointment, birth/death. Those with a bittersweet temperament are keenly aware of the passage of time and, as a result of their sadness, have a felt understanding of what matters most. At their best they can transmute those feelings into expressive music, art, poetry, and invention as a sublime response to emotional pain. And they can commune with others in those universal feelings of loss, compassion, and ultimately connection.
Okay — so here are some of my takeaways:
The US rewards happy/angry types. The author states that the United States, where I live, is not super hospitable to the melancholic. It is much more comfortable with the forward-leaning style of happy and angry types. Sadness tends to make us look backwards in a way that does not comport with capitalistic mindsets. She has a whole interesting passage about the history from Calvinism through the prosperity gospel that frowns upon grief and sorrow and is impatient for people to get back to being upbeat and productive. There are also very few rituals in American culture to memorialize and celebrate those we have lost. It’s all onward and upward.
Longing is normal and healthy. Of course it is! But somehow we have lost sight of this. Yearning for ideal love, an ideal family, a perfect life. This is all normal. We have little sadnesses every day to remind us that reality doesn’t always comport with our wants. But sadness is ultimately the only way to move through those realizations. Without acknowledging that yearning and processing the sadness, you simply push down your desires and continue to live in a kind of detached fantasy world.
Feeling sad makes you whole. People on the healthy end of the melancholy spectrum, contrary to popular belief, are not sad all of the time. In fact, on balance those folks have a greater access to bliss, ecstasy, and whole-hearted gratitude. They have a better sense of what matters and can infuse their lives with more meaning as a result. They have closer and more genuine relationships and they have the ability to connect more easily with others to commune with their sorrow or share their joy. Their entire range of emotions is wider.
The Buddhist idea of non-attachment is kind of BS. I’ve never found a good explanation of this, but this book comes close. I get the idea that if you aren’t attached to things or people, you mourn them less. But, as a trained psychotherapist, this smacks of avoidant attachment. The solution to grief is not protecting yourself from ever feeling it by never giving your heart away. It is learning to move through it and make meaning from the experience afterward. She didn’t precisely say this, but it’s what I took away!
Sadness can generate creativity. The ability to feel sadness is positively correlated with creative output. In fact, the author starts this journey with a question about why she is drawn to sad music. She mentions here that depression is a bleak, dark hole and does not generate creativity. So, again this is on the healthy side of melancholy. I know someone who went through an existential crisis recently and what has brought her back was creativity — journaling, collecting experiences, fashion, beauty, art. All of these pursuits and connecting with others pulled her back from her anxiety and dread. The learning she brought out of it was that . . .
Transience is majestic. Life is transient. Our experiences are all transient. Our loves are transient. We don’t always live life holding this in mind. But when we realize how fleeting it all is, we can be overwhelmed. I lived in Japan for 2 years where there is an annual celebration when the cherry blossoms bloom. They are so delicate and ephemeral that they only last for a handful of days. And so the Japanese throng into the parks to eat picnic food and drink under the blossoms to celebrate the transience of the sakura, of beauty, and of life. It’s freaking awesome and I can’t imagine it ever happening here in the States.
Good grief. Loss is gut wrenching. You can’t prescribe how to do it right, but those who heal well embrace certain aspects of the process: acknowledging your feelings, don’t try to control or avoid them, make time to feel the feelings, expect occasionally to be overwhelmed, give yourself grace, catch yourself when you are are being self critical and — these last 2 are the upward part of the curve — allow your grief to clarify what matters to you and then take action to bring more of that into your life. And allow grief to change you. You don’t get over loss, you incorporate it into who you are — so that you move forward changed, weightier, wiser, and sometimes more solemn. But also, grateful, open, and compassionate. Allow grief to shape you.
How to be more melancholic. Okay — she doesn’t put it quite like that, but I think it’s required to be an authentic, compassionate human being. When I work with couples, I frequently have to work on feeling sadness with the partner who struggles with empathy. For them to actually feel what their partner is feeling (which is what empathy is), they have to be able to easily access their own sorrow or sadness. And one thing is — you can’t do it if you feel superior. Superiority allows you to distance yourself and feel better than others — and it’s the enemy of empathy. And there are lots of ways to cultivate your own melancholy: listen to sad music, practice the loving-kindness meditation, notice and grieve impermanence in nature, think about death, read about the experiences of others — both fiction and memoir. But most of all, allow yourself to wallow in it. Allow yourself to go through it. Frequently. One of my favorite quotes was by Melinda French Gates and paraphrased is, “I spend time every day allowing my heart to break.” Now that is someone who has both the melancholy and the means to turn her compassion and loss into healing and better welfare for millions of people. Not all of us have that ability, but we can certainly all turn our loss into something that matters.
I don’t need to tell you that I loved the book and highly recommend it. It’s an easy read and full of stories and examples. I read a lot, but there are some books that cut to the heart of identity or meaning for me and this one falls into that category.
I’d love to know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for reading.
Comments