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Writer's pictureminie

The gift of sadness

Written on 18 June

 

New hearing aid for my baby

Sadness is a weird feeling.

Out of all the emotions that one can experience, sadness is the least appealing and popular.

When you’re sad, people immediately think that you are depressed, while in fact you are not depressed. You are just sad.

In our special needs journey, so many people tell me “it’s ok if you are angry, let it all out!”. And my answer, many times, is “I’m not angry. I’m sad”.

 

Anger seems so much more proactive than sadness. Anger is loud, it makes you scream, act out, express all the energy that you have inside.

Some people use anger as the main reaction to many issues in their lives, because it makes them feel in control, it makes them believe that they are still leading their journey.

Sadness is the opposite: sadness works well in silence, sadness doesn’t need reactions, unless you want to cry it all out.

When you are sad, you are not in control: you are abandoning yourself to the resulting emotion of what life brought to you.

 

This sense of abandonment is the true gift of sadness.

While you are letting sadness go through your soul, you are accepting that you are not in control, you are accepting that life has played a curved ball on you, and you cannot do anything about it.

When you acknowledge that you are sad, you are not giving in to apathy: you are very much proactive as you would be if you were angry.

 

You see, I don’t know much about boxing, except that learning to get hit is just as important as learning how to hit.

If you try to be fast at punching while you’re getting punched, you’ll get hurt and won’t avoid getting punched anyway.

Instead, if you learn how to accept the punch as it’s coming, you remain focused, and you are able to get ready for your next move.

The more you learn to get hit, the less it will overwhelm you in the long term.

This is what happens when you allow yourself to experience sadness: you are getting punched, and you accept that there’s nothing you can do about it.

You are not letting all your energy out: you are letting all the external pressure in because, once you will be able to react, you will use all that pressure to hit harder. You know you will be able to hit back, you just don’t know when and you are ok with it.

 

Sadness is patience. Sadness is acceptance. Sadness is exhaling all the used air that you have in your lungs, so you can inhale new oxygen, new life.

 

So today I’m allowing myself to feel sad, because we have set up the new hearing aid that my baby will have to wear indefinitely.

I’m not angry, I’m sad.

And I’m hurt, because this is yet again a new disability journey that she didn’t choose and, yet again, one that we don’t know anything about and that we will all have to accept, whether we like it or not.

I’m not in control and I’m sad.

 

Out of all the equipment that we had to deal with (feeding pumps, suction machine, braces and harnesses), hearing aids are the first piece of equipment that won’t have an end to it.

We knew that the suction machine was temporary, we knew that hip braces would be temporary, we were hoping that the feeding pump would be temporary (and it was).

But hearing aids are here to stay.

And I’m sad, I have to accept this new “toy” and I have no idea how I’m going to do this.

 

Today I will abandon myself to sadness, I will cry as much as I want, I will let my soul get shredded in a million pieces again and again.

Until I’m ready to heal.

I do believe that tomorrow there will be more space for hope, joy, fun; but not today.

Today sadness is leading my journey and, whether other people appreciate it or not, I see a great gift in it.

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