WHEN YOU'RE HURTING

20. On Sadness

"The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea." —Isak Dinesen

Dear Kids,

I wrote this letter for a day I hope you never have, but know you will. If you're reading it on that day, you can skip the rest of the book and just stay here a while. Heartbreak is one register of sadness — and we've already talked about that one. But there's a bigger shape behind it that life will eventually teach you, and I'd rather you hear it from me first.

I won't tell you it's beautiful. It isn't.

What I will tell you is what I know from the inside.

I've written you, in earlier letters, about three different rooms. The hotel room with the cold pasta on the desk, where I sat at twenty-four and asked myself whose life I was actually living. The small office where I paced and refreshed the bank app at 2 a.m., wondering if I'd lose everything I'd built. The parking lot in another letter where I described the version of you who finally cries because the job is wrong. I treated those rooms as scenes about meaning, or risk, or work. But underneath the meaning, the risk, the work, those were also just rooms where I was very sad and didn't know what to call it. I want to be honest about that now, because dressing up sadness as "stress" or "burnout" or "a hard season" is something my generation got good at, and I don't want you to inherit the trick.

There will be a night, kids. Maybe more than one. Where the apartment is too quiet, or too loud. Where you've stopped answering your phone because answering would mean explaining, and explaining is more than you have. Where you eat something cold standing at the counter because sitting down at the table feels like a performance you can't put on. Where the future does the strange thing where it stops looking like a future — it just looks like more of this, indefinitely. Where the smallest tasks — a shower, an email, a load of laundry — become enormous, and not finishing them becomes its own quiet humiliation.

That is the shape. It comes from a hundred different causes. A breakup. A death. A diagnosis. A failure you can't spin. A long stretch of work that ate the wrong years. Sometimes — and this is the part nobody warns you about — it comes from nothing in particular. You'll wake up one morning and the lights inside you will just be lower, and they'll stay lower for longer than you think a person can carry it, and there won't be a clean reason. The brain does this sometimes. Yours might. Mine has.

Here is what I have actually learned, after my own bad nights and after sitting with people I love on theirs.

The first thing is that sadness lies to you about its duration. While you're inside it, it feels permanent. The future flattens. You can't picture wanting breakfast again, or laughing at something stupid Jack says, or being curious about a piece of news. The flattening is a symptom of the sadness, not a fact about your life. I know that doesn't help much in the middle of it — knowing the lighthouse exists doesn't dry your clothes — but I want you to have it written down somewhere, in your dad's handwriting, so that on the worst night you can read it and remember that the part of your brain telling you this is forever is not a reliable narrator. It is a tired narrator. Tired narrators get the story wrong.

The second thing is that the way out is not up. It's sideways. Through. Down the corridor, into the next hour. Not "feel better." Not "look on the bright side." Not even "process it." Just: get from this hour to the next one without making anything worse. Eat something. Drink water. Sleep if you can. Walk around the block. Wash one dish. Reply to one message — the one from the person who actually loves you, not the one from work. The little stuff feels insulting when you're at the bottom — you're telling me to drink water? — but the little stuff is the rope. I have been the person at the bottom. The rope is what I'd hand you.

The third thing is that you can't do it alone, and trying to is not strength. It's the dumbest kind of pride. The bad nights in my own life that I look back on with the most regret are not the ones where I felt the worst — they're the ones where I felt the worst and didn't tell anyone. I sat in an apartment in Beijing one winter, two countries away from anyone who would have come over, and chose to be alone because I had decided, somewhere along the way, that needing people was a weakness. It is the single most useless lesson I ever taught myself, and I'm trying to unlearn it in writing, in front of you, right now. Tell someone, kids. Not because they'll fix it. They won't. Tell them because the act of letting another person see you in that state breaks the spell that says you are uniquely, monstrously, secretly broken. You are not. You're a person having a bad time. People have bad times. The ones who let other people in survive them.

The fourth thing — and this is the one I least wanted to write — is that sadness, if you let it stay too long alone in a quiet room, can convince you it's the truth. Other states of mind don't do this. Joy doesn't whisper this is the only real version of you. Boredom doesn't either. Sadness does, and it's lying, and the lie is dangerous. If you ever cross into the territory where the lie starts sounding like a plan — call somebody. A friend. A doctor. Me, if I'm still around. I do not care what time it is. I do not care what you think of me knowing. I do not care if you think you're being dramatic. The cost of being wrong about this is everything. The cost of asking for help when you didn't strictly need it is an awkward phone call. Pick the awkward phone call. Every single time.

There's a book I read in that same Beijing winter — Samantha Harvey's The Shapeless Unease, a memoir of a year she spent not sleeping, not in the cute insomniac way but in the real way, where the body forgets how to do the thing it's supposed to do automatically. What landed for me wasn't her descriptions of the sleeplessness; it was her refusal to package it as a story with a resolution. She doesn't solve the unease. She doesn't transform it into a redemption arc. She just names it, accurately, and keeps walking through it. Reading her made me less frantic about my own bad weeks, because she gave me permission to stop pretending the sadness needed a finish line before I could be honest about it. Some of this stuff doesn't get fixed in the way a problem gets fixed. It gets carried. The act of naming it — out loud, on paper, to another person — turns out to be most of the work.

Now — what I won't pretend.

I won't tell you you're loved beyond measure, because that's a sentence that means nothing when you don't believe you're lovable at all. I won't tell you you've made millions of people smile, because on the bad night you can't picture any of them. I won't tell you to remember every obstacle you've overcome, because the brain that's sad can't access that file. The greeting-card version of this letter is the version that fails you on the night you actually need it. So I'm writing you the version that won't.

What I'll say instead is the small, true thing.

Sadness ends. Not because you fix it. Because time is patient, and the body, even at its worst, wants to keep being alive. The colors come back in pieces — first as small mercies you barely notice. A song that doesn't hurt to hear. A morning you wake up and the first thought isn't the worst one. A laugh that surprises you out of yourself in the middle of a grocery store. You won't see the corner getting turned. You'll just notice, weeks later, that you've turned it. That's how it works. It is the most boring and most reliable thing I know about the human brain. Hold on long enough and the chemistry shifts. Sit with one person and the loneliness shrinks. Make it through one bad week and the next one is, almost imperceptibly, a little less bad.

I'm not going to tell you I'm proud of you for living. That's too cheap for what it actually costs. I'll tell you, instead, that I have been on enough bad nights to know what the work is. The work is staying. Staying through the hour. Staying in the room. Staying in the body. Staying close enough to one other human being that you can be reached. That's it. There's no trick under the trick. There's just staying.

If the next letter is the happier one — and it is — read it later. Not now. Now, just stay.

I'll be here when you come up.

Love,

Dad