Readers Write: Savouring Our Sadness

In January, fuelled by a mixture of new year enthusiasm and the excitement of planning a trip to Brazil, I started learning Portuguese. By March, my world had shrunk to a 2km radius and the idea of learning a new language or planning international adventures seemed futile. I have, however, spent a lot of time thinking about how well the Portuguese word Saudade captures what many of us are feeling as we are caught in the web of enduring uncertainty that has pervaded every aspect of our lives since early Spring. Saudade describes a feeling of absence or state of longing for something that is lost or missing. Over the past few months, moments of melancholic and nostalgic reflection have become part and parcel of my daily routine. I also feel a deep sadness and yearning, not only for a life that will never be quite the same but for a life that might have been.

My world just before lockdown was a dopamine-filled bubble of happiness. After a long period of being single, I had gone on an amazing first date involving polka-dot wellies, a loveable Labrador and his very attractive owner. A warm smile. Easy chat. Creases around the eyes hinting at kindness and a healthy dose of mischief. I was captivated by him. Five hours and a refreshingly open and honest conversation later, we hugged and said our goodbyes. He suggested meeting up again in a couple of weeks. ‘Sounds great’ I replied, a little too brightly - two weeks seemed like an eternity. Yet I knew this was something that shouldn’t be rushed. The ping of a text when I got home with the words ‘I’m still grinning’ gave me a sense of hopeful anticipation I hadn’t felt in an awfully long time.

Within weeks I had shed my protective cloak of independence and jumped straight into the muddy puddle of a new relationship. I had honestly forgotten the joy and heady excitement of those early dating days - spontaneous nights out with flirtatious banter, sitting in his kitchen drinking wine and dissecting the day while he cooked dinner, a bottomless well of stories to exchange and the introduction to friends who were soon cast under his charismatic spell.

While my head issued regular warning signals about unfinished business with his ex and the danger of rebound relationships, my heart was blinded to the emotional baggage that was spilling onto the carousel. I was so smitten that I willfully ignored the rawness of his recent break-up and the complicated knot of responsibilities and finances yet to be untangled. Lockdown arrived and brought me an unwanted gift of anxiety-fuelled sleep deprivation resulting in a dangerous concoction of angst, overthinking and mind games. With my usual treadmill of busyness on pause, the persistent gnawing feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right was amplified and when we were finally able to meet up again I found myself in an agonising tug-of-war between my head and heart.

The story, as you have probably guessed, does not have a Disney ending. Returning to my single reality brought about an unexpected and profound sense of grief, not simply for a relationship that didn’t work out as I’d hoped, but for a life path I hadn’t chosen. I am not married, don’t have children or pets and, through my lens of self-pity, show few of the social markers of acceptable progression for a forty-something-year-old. Why was I suddenly grieving for a life I had never yearned for before? The break-up brought an onset of despair and loneliness that knocked me off-kilter and made me question everything. Is this what a mid-life crisis looks like?

It feels as if the carefully constructed jigsaw of my life has been broken into pieces and, as I try to reconstruct it, I am finding some of the pieces are missing. My delicate ecosystem of contentment has been destroyed and, without the distraction of family or a busy schedule, I have too much time to dwell on what is missing and all the things I don’t have. I know in the grand scheme of things I have very little to complain about. I should be grateful for the lovely life I have, my wonderful friends, secure job and, now more than ever, my health.

Yet, as Helen Russell writes in her book ‘The Atlas of Happiness’, we cannot be ‘carnival happy’ all the time and the lows we experience need to exist to help us to appreciate the highs.

Russell believes we should look to the Brazilians for inspiration on how to savour our sad feelings rather than trying to suppress them.

She even goes so far as to include the concept of Saudade as one of her global secrets to happiness. After all, it is only when we come close to losing something that we truly value it.

While our emotional immune systems want to protect us against pain, we each have our reasons to feel sadness and loss right now. Yet, we are living in a world where sadness is devalued and gets hidden behind a mask of social media positivity and gratitude, or disguised as an angry twitter rant. Could we, instead, normalise our feelings of sadness, melancholy and nostalgia and accept them as an integral part of life that we can share without fear of being judged or compared to others who are worse off. While we can be grateful for the things we have, can we also lament what is missing from our lives?

Embracing saudade has allowed me to wallow for a while in the sadness and the loneliness that accompanies my new reality. It is also my love letter to a different life and the hope that those missing pieces of the jigsaw will appear again in the future now that I’ve made space for them. In the words of Garth Brookes, if I missed the pain, I’d have had to miss the dance.’ Saudade is simply a celebration of both the pain and the dance.

Readers Write: Savouring Our Sadness

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