Are You In Love With Your Sadness?

I have to admit, I was. I had a total love affair with my sadness. I loved it. Sat in it. Relished it. It was my identity, the cloak I wore to protect myself from the outside world, a cloak that I thought kept me safe, but was slowly killing me, keeping me alone, and more and more disconnected from the world around me.

I used to wear my sadness like a badge of honor, I thought it made me a martyr, that I would get up and grace anyone in the day made me a hero, that I could overcome my sadness just long enough to participate in life made me a superhero I thought. But it was all self-indulgent bullshit. My sadness was within my control. My sadness was my choice. My sadness didn’t make me a martyr, it made me prisoner, but a prisoner of my own prison, that I had made. I would tell myself I was safe there, better off there, and deserved to be there, I thought it protected me from getting hurt, but it was holding me back from living life, from exploring new things, and from moving forward from the pain of my past. Looking back it was selfish, I cheated, not only myself, but everyone in my life from getting to know the real me, from me fully being engaged in my life and theirs, and from ever opening my heart.

When I look back at those years now I feel, well, sad. I feel sad for that girl who thought she didn’t deserve better. I feel sad that she wasted so many years hiding in the darkness when she could be been shining bright in the light. I feel like I never want to go back to being that sad girl and give up what I have now.

We get to choose, we get to say who we are, and how we’re going to live our lives, and today I choose happiness, gratitude, and light, to be brave and step out of the shadows, to connect with others like me, and to challenge myself to walk tall and be proud of who I am. Sometimes that sad girl creeps back, she finds me, and sometimes she’s hard to shake off, but I’m not her anymore, that dark cloak doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel safe anymore, it feels dangerous, and heavy, and suffocating. Thankfully that cloak doesn’t stay on too long today, my love affair with it has long past, even though the voices in my head will tell me that’s who I am, where I belong, I know different, I feel different, so I work to leave it behind. We have the power to leave it behind. We hold the key. And that key is light, a bright shiny light. When we let our light shine that dark cloak starts to disappear, the sadness starts to disappear, and we feel the warmth of our hearts, and who we are, who we are meant to be, anything else is a lie, a lie that we tell ourselves when we are afraid and we try to romanticize the darkness to make it OK to live there.

For me it took drastic changes to lose my love of my sadness, and it was hard to start, but just by doing loving things every day, for myself and others, the cloak of sadness slowly started to slip off, it slowly lost it’s place in my life, and it slowly went away.

It takes far more courage to live in the light than to bask in the darkness of our own sadness. We as SLAYERS don’t fear the light, we don’t back down from challenges and the work it might take to have a life that have dreamed of, a life full of goodness, love, and light. It’s there for us, if we choose to take it, and if we choose to shed our sadness for something brighter.

SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you have a love affair with the sadness in your life? Is your sadness a place that you feel safe? Do you let it define you? Do you see how it can be keeping you from connecting with people and living life? What’s stopping you from letting it go? Is it worth giving up living a happy and full life to continue loving your sadness? What do you think you would gain by letting it go? Is your sadness even valid, or is it events from your past? You have the choice SLAYER to linger in your sadness, or to let it go and live your life. It’s your choice. Stand in the light and let it go, the love you may feel for it doesn’t compare to the love that is waiting for you if you let it go. SLAY on.

S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you