choosing to be sad?

Lately there has been debate about the place of melancholy, and the over-abundance of "happy pill" prescriptions, society demanding that we all smile all the time.

As I read my previous post I thought "I chose to indulge in that sadness yesterday. I chose not to block it out, to pretend to myself that all was well".

Emotions are very real, and I believe that at some stage in our life they must be worked through. I used to talk to "difficult" teenagers about how to cope with their emotional baggage. I have used art therapy on myself. But sometimes, more particularly here, I simply give in to the emotion and let it work through me.

Yesterday at 4pm I pulled myself together (I thought) and went to a trigesimo mass, the mass that follows a few weeks after a funeral. Instead of the normal choir of five or six local women there was the organist, and a soprano and a flautist. The music was superb. Knowing that under his purple robe the priest was wearing polo shirt and jeans took nothing from the ceremony. Knowing that the singer is married to the local butcher, cuts up meat and has two young children to care for does not diminish the power and beauty of her world class academy-trained voice. Knowing that under my sunglasses my eyes would be red when I emerged did not stop me tingling all through and weeping as I listened to the music. Still not really sure why I was a bit of a "cot case" I let the tears flow.

Why am I writing this? Because just maybe someone, somewhere, needs to read it. Now I respond to intuition much more. I remember once working with a suicidal teenager and having huge trouble convincing her parents that she required medical help for depression. No weakness was tolerated in that family. To convince them that it was OK to need help the counsellor and I told our own stories of depression, confessed to our own need for medication. She got the help that she needed, and enjoys a full life now.

I always maintained that John Kirwin's greatest gift to New Zealand youth was not his skills as a rugby player but his public admission of his battle with depression. He made it OK to talk about mental health.

Sadness, nostalgia and melancholy is not the same as depression. But maybe, somewhere, someone needed to know that it is OK to feel blue sometimes. Tomorrow, there will be sunshine. There will be yellow, orange, and gold.

And for me, today, there is a kind of quiet colour that defies definition. Not happy, not really sad. I think it might be called acceptance.

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