Bedroom pop artist Phoebe Axa makes the case for leaning into sadness
No one likes ‘sad’. In fact, we’d slam the door on it. Leave it shivering in the cold, where it festers and grows. But it visits for a reason. Maybe it’s the only feeling we actively reject — we welcome happiness, even anger. But not ‘sad’. Only when we begin to build a relationship with it, do we truly learn what it also means to be happy. To evolve, listen and engage. The human attempt to eliminate sadness is what left it the doorstep, so can we decide to take it in?
We don’t always have an understanding of the root of our sadness. It’s a dense fog in our chest that seeps upward, into our mind, clouding our judgment and adding a grey-blue tint to our world. Yet we crave it in its absence — have weeks of walking to the beat of a numb pulse, we can beg to cry, feel and dive deep. Sometimes it’s bereavement and sorrow – we let the garden overgrow at the thought of it. For some of us it lives on the outside, we wear it like a translucent coat – for others it feeds on us from the inside, we are a host for its dull ache.
Sadness has a rhythm. It comes on slowly — it’s a blot of ink on parchment that gradually expands. I think we all like to feel a little sad. After all, happy-sad songs are the best ones aren’t they — Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’, a true internal burn of lyrical sadness, accompanied by driving beats and thumping bass. ABBA’s ‘Mamma Mia’ with its jumping melodies, all surrounding a story of betrayal and heartache. Nena’s ‘99 Luftballons’, its darker meaning disguised by soaring synths and charging drums. Without sadness, what is happiness?
When I say ‘everything makes me sad’, I am referring to a spectrum. A scale elucidated by a blue palette, ‘night-sky’ being the darkest, all the way to a light and airy ‘periwinkle’, almost translucent; from the depths of utter despondency to melancholy, sky-high wistful woes. But all the while – sadness.
The looming failure of humanity and lack of parity in our existence can bring on immense despair, a constant reminder of our mortal powerlessness can lead us into a version of sadness that edges on insanity. Even just the scent of sun on air, the sound of children playing or the smell of sunscreen tips me into melancholia. Behind those smells is nostalgia. A trigger of change, a loss — that rhythm I can’t repeat. There’s a lack of stillness in life, moments are temporary. Sadness becomes a motif for survival — a sign that we are still going, dragging our baggage onward.
For some, it’s in our make-up, a disposition. We engage in an internal mind game of chemicals, employing strategies to manage the beast. Channelling that sadness could be a superpower. But it involves bursting through a concrete dam, not knowing what the damages to your vessel could be, accepting the turbulence of that journey; what it means to be that open wound. Humans are not born to be numb. Our bones are assembled to withstand, to connect and action. Welcoming sadness is to remove the skin and be raw, not knowing when the salt water will choose to baptise.
We are built to move forward and accept the harsh reality that we might not have our current circumstances ever again. It means that even the most innocently, gleeful moments can be coated in a distant, blue film, the idea that memories can’t be happy because they are transient, never to be lived again. But without that wistful time capsule in our minds – would we recognise the beauty of the present? Sadness is to surrender and there’s something powerful in that. It’s a sign that you can validate your experiences and acknowledge how they affect you.
I wonder if my generation even knows what it means to be truly present. Every moment is now captured and filed. Thousands of photos and miniature life documentaries in our camera rolls, that we may never look at again. Are we doing this for validation, and navigation, or to report a present moment of feeling to an audience? Our minds are either dawdling in the past or projected so far into the future we are dissociated and numb, ever-distant, depriving ourselves of real emotion and experience. Sad.
But there still seems to be beauty in sadness, in its bitterness and weight at times, in the delicacy of us as humans. We grieve, share loss – there is unity in our sadness. We aim to decode it, fit it to our logic, but sadness is not always logical in the rejected corners of our minds. We must accept its sometimes jagged form. Through our sad films, music, stories and most desolate memories, we are alive. Human passion is tragedy in itself – our inevitable doom on this earth is crippling, yet here we are still feeling and chasing on.
You are more ready for ‘sad’ than you think. Maybe you don’t want it. But we need to meet, greet and invite it in. It can visit for special occasions, a midnight rant, a gentle minute – then we can consign it to its place and get on with living.
Having said this… still for some reason, on some days, everything makes me sad.
