Sadness is easier. Sadness is comfortable. Perhaps most crucially, sadness is familiar. There is a feeling of safe, a feeling of calm and a feeling of “this is where i should stay” when it comes to things that are familiar. It is more difficult to stray, more difficult to try new things, more difficult to venture into the unknown territory of happiness. Even when one enjoys an experience and hopes to live it again, there is a reluctance. There is a fear that this too will fade, that feelings of happiness should come in small and sporadic doses.

Happiness doesn’t last, not in the way sadness does. For days one can remain in their melancholy, one can remain retrospective of all their misery and happiness can do nothing to penetrate that and lift one out of their sorrows. Sadness is ultimately more powerful. Sadness has the ability to drown joy and the person temporarily experiencing it. Sadness is the woman that walks into the room and even without uttering a word, demands attention. It demands to be seen and felt and heard and carried and never let go of.

“You don’t deserve happiness” both you and sadness say. You convince yourself that your short comings, your imperfections, your mistakes, they make you unworthy. Sadness amplifies and magnifies every time that you have fallen short of perfect. Everytime you dare to be happy, you dare to step outside the comfort zone, out of familiarity, it stops you. It points out your lack of perfection as evidence of why you are undeserving. “Remember you have done this?” “Remember when you said that?” and most painfully “Remember that this is who you are.” By “this” it means sadness. It means that you are your shortcomings, you are your failures, you are everything that is wrong with you. And it is right. We are. But we are also our successes, we are our amazing traits, we are the perfection that resides inside us that we are sometimes blind to see. Sadness says that we are reliant on it, to remain interesting or to make good art or to be comfortable. But that is a lie. We can remain independent of it, we can make good art without it and we can find that same comfort in happiness.

Happiness can become our default, that thing that we are most familiar in and with. Sadness can be the stranger, the one that we find discomfort in. Because that’s yet another lie it tells us, that it’s easier.