This is a story of being sad.

Not because it’s never been told before, or because this story of sadness is special or vast or because this story is one of the triumph of the human spirit against interminable odds or dragons or something.

Simply because I’ve told a lot of stories about being happy, or bored, or silly, and so I thought I would tell this one too.

Once there was a girl, and she got pretty sad for a bit.

She cried:

In the shower (x2)

On her mother’s couch

On a Jetstar flight to Melbourne

In bed (x2)

In the office of the indescribably kind Indian GP at the end of her street

At her desk (x3)

The reasons why don’t matter so much; suffice to say she wanted something that she thought would make her life pretty excellent (forgetting in the mean time that her life was already, pretty excellent) and then discovered to her horror that the softly glowing future of her naïve desire was not to be.

So she cried a lot and listened to too much Damien Rice (lovely but inevitably unhelpful), and wondered if this thing that had made her sad (a small thing, as far as things go) had broken her a little.

Now- her sadness, in comparison to say, an ocean of such a thing was only a puddle, or a wee glass full of sadness. You might not have even noticed it floating gently behind her eyes if you had talked to her. But you see, it was a potent and a dark sadness, grown darker with infusions of her dreams, many months worth of denying and that most gruesome helper- hope. It weighed upon her chest.

She was a lucky girl, and as such was surrounded by a veritable forest of sensible friends (and an incomprehensibly nice doctor man) to help her lever the heavy sadness away. She was also blessed by having Things To Do, which meant that as much as she wanted to lay in her bed bleating sadly she could not. Thank heavens.

Here are some more things that helped her:

Music

Staying off of Facebook

Staying away from beer

A magic mantra she chanted to herself when she got sad, consisting of a vision of how she wanted to feel when she was not sad anymore (and an easily reprogrammable brain- made so from years of memorising pop lyrics)

Being honest

Laughter

Magnolia season

And so, the girl incrementally stopped dwelling in sadness, and got on with things. She had function. She had necessity. She had things she could do. And she remembered that before wanting the thing she had wanted that her life was really, really excellent.

She is aware that she will sound like a douchebag being sad for a couple of days then blogging about it like she knows anything other than a very little bit about bidding a repeated farewell to something you think would have been some kind of perfect, but sadness is something very vivid and sometimes very not discussed, and she believes in being open.

And so it is possible, that within your circle, or your sphere, or your hectagon, there are many many reasons to get out of bed, even on the days when that seems like utter fantasy. And hopefully if and when you are sad you will find yourself in a sensible forest and you can write a wee story like this one about the time that you were sad, and were lucky enough to learn again how not to be.

The End.