sorrow makes for better theatre than healing ever could!

I have myself struggled with this a lot.
This fear that if I ever became less depressed, I’d lose my ability to read so much and write so beautifully. What if I lose my beautiful language, the only meaningful something pain has given me?

There is something so unnervingly elegant about curated sadness. It knows where the light hits best. It knows to speak in truths that are half lies.

Somewhere along the way, we have taught ourselves that pain is only tolerable if it is poetic. Raw grief becomes too much; it must be edited, decorated with soundtracks, dressed in silk and translated into a story that makes people pause, but never look too long.
We do not write essays about the morning after the breakdown night. About brushing our teeth with the same hand that texted I miss you. About eating breakfast without appetite. About how healing often feels indistinguishable from boredom. We want narrative. We want arcs. But real healing doesn’t arc. It drags. It repeats itself. It forgets its lines.

Pain gives us a beautiful language. But healing snatches it away.

I don’t think we’re obsessed with suffering itself. I think we’re obsessed with the idea that suffering might mean we’re deeper than we look. That if we hurt dramatically enough, it must mean something. It must matter. And if it doesn’t, then what? Then it was just inconvenient. Embarrassing, even. That’s why heartbreak is a genre and healing isn’t. It’s why so many of us have better metaphors for falling apart than we do for staying alive. Even myself.

A friend once told me she didn’t know how to write when she was content. She said joy felt blank. Not silent, just….. too unspecific. It didn’t grip her like grief did. And I understood exactly what she meant. There’s something maddening about the softness of peace. It doesn’t demand to be witnessed. It doesn’t dress up. It just sits there. Like the McGill Sensory Deprivation Experiments in the 1950s.

We don’t talk about this enough, that we sometimes keep pain close not out of masochism, but out of fear that letting go would leave us narratively stranded. Like, who are we if not the person who suffered? What do we write about if nothing is falling apart?

What if we’ve built our identity on the aesthetic of ache?

This isn’t to say we’re faking it. Quite the opposite. The pain is real. But our instinct to wrap it in beauty is what I find strange. And a little tragic as well. We talk about depression through a Lana Del Rey / Billie Eilish lens. We post about anxiety in lowercase letters, with soft lighting and cherry blossoms in the background. We don’t mention the dishes that haven’t been done in three weeks. Or the smell. Or the uncombed hair. Or the 3 a.m. Google searches that no one would ever find poetic. We present our ruins like museum pieces, but not everything needs a gallery. Some things just need silence. Or time. Or no witnesses at all.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this:

we don’t need to be hurting to be interesting. We don’t need to suffer beautifully to be taken seriously. And we definitely don’t need to turn every bruise into an exhibit.
There is nothing wrong with making art from pain, in fact that has been my best friend and my best expression for ages now. But we should be suspicious of the part of us that’s scared to let it go. Not because we’re still hurting, but because we’re scared we’ll have nothing left to say once we stop.

Because I have seen it close enough. The real wound has no filter. Just a quiet question in the dark:
What now?