DailyJim: I have been feeling more and more afraid to feel sad, especially around other people

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, January 21st, 2025, and today I want to talk about how I have been feeling more and more afraid to feel sad, especially around other people.

So this one will be probably sad, and we call sad heavy these days, I guess.

I had so much tension in my body. I've had so much tension in my body for months, if not years. And tightness in the muscles and the bones are cracking and aching. And you can hear, like, everything readjusting.

It scares me, actually. And it finally hit me last night, I think, that the fear is not so much of a specific thing happening. It's about, it's a fear of feeling sad and a fear of expressing the sadness around other people, especially.

As many of you may know, my mom passed away just over two years ago and I was bawling, bawling. I gave a, I recited a poem that I wrote at her funeral and I was bawling. weeping.

And it seems to be the only time in life we're allowed to do that. And even then, some people said I shouldn't have made it so sad. And I just saw the reactions that people had to the sadness. Some were okay. Some came and comforted me. Some cried with me. Some laughed it off. Some got annoyed. Some distanced themselves.

Some seemed afraid of the sadness.

I've seen in a lot of my relationships, romantic relationships as well, where sadness is seen as a bad thing.

We cry and people laugh at us. We cry and people get angry. We cry and people run away.

And sometimes it's not even crying. Sometimes it's just feeling a little bit of sadness. And you can see the mood shift. You feel sad and then the other person gets annoyed. No. Why aren't you being more tender? Why aren't you being sad with me? Why are you being annoyed? Why are you laughing at me? Why are you trying to change the subject and cheer me up? I just want to feel sad.

And we don't have many spaces where we can do that anymore. I didn't grow up with the church or any other religious affiliation but I do know that I think the church is one space where a lot of people can feel sad and it's okay, you can talk about how you're suffering or how somebody else in your life is suffering and how much pain it's bringing to you and bringing to those that you love it's okay and people come together, they hold hands, they comfort you and they feel the pain with you, I just reflect on my life and how much pain I've been holding in. The election was yesterday, Martin Luther King. I never got the chance to meet Martin Luther King Jr. Makes me feel sad.

Seeing the way the election was done and how President Trump's official portrait is like a scowl, just makes me feel sad.

Being so far away from the U.S. when this all is happening makes me feel sad.

Seeing how relationships have changed throughout my life based on some of the choices I've made for work and some of the choices I've made for lack of their better of for not making any money. Not making money.

It makes me feel sad just seeing some broken relationships. It makes me feel sad thinking about my mom. It makes me feel sad thinking about one of my math teachers teacher from high school just passed away recently, and I just saw his notification. I had seen a different teacher, another math teacher from high school. I bumped into him into the mall a few weeks ago, and he told me this other teacher wasn't doing well, Mr. Tabar, and that he had been in hospice for like two years, and his body was just deteriorating away. He couldn't remember who anyone was, even his wife. I hadn't wanted to go see him, but I didn't. And he may not even noticed that I was there, but so I feel sad that I didn't go. It's just so much sadness. There's so much sadness. I was talking with a friend yesterday and he was all, Trump is full of love. Trump is going to save the world against his wicked souls. And you know what happened? We finally got down to the real issue that his mom died during COVID, not because she had COVID, but because she was in a place where they were so afraid of COVID that they weren't treating other patients.

And he hadn't seen her in 10 years. And he was supposed to see her just like a month after that.

And then he tried to go to the U.S. to see his siblings, and his visa got denied. So he couldn't even go and grieve with his siblings.

There's just a lot of sadness going around in the world right now. We're not talking about it. We're not feeling it. We're just shoving it down. We're so afraid. We're so angry. We're so resistant to all this sadness.

And my, oh my, it comes out in weird ways, dangerous ways. How many people are addicted to alcohol and marijuana and harder drugs and porn and gambling and working and all these different things because we're just running away from the sadness.

Just running away from the sadness. But the sadness is still there. It's part of life. It's part of love. How are we supposed to live and love in this world if we don't feel sad? When we feel sad, we feel the closest to people. When we feel sad, it reminds us that we love people, we care about people, we care about ourselves.

I really hope we start having the courage to feel sad, the courage to cry.

I hope I do. It scares me. I imagine it scares other people too because of the reactions we get when we feel sad. Some of the reactions can be so violent.

It can cause so much more pain and pull us out of the sadness because if they get really angry, or if they get really afraid, or if they get really joking, then maybe we get pulled into that. And it's not a pure sadness. It becomes like an angry sadness, or a joyful sadness, or a, what do you want to call it? Kind of like an afraid sadness, a fearful sadness.

Sadness is still there. It's still there.

Did this workshop called alba alba method as teacher nancy loitz ran it and i remember we did an exercise where we were trying to go into a pure anger pattern and most people showed signs of sadness or a lot of people did it's a specific thing that happens with the face with the eyebrow, that uh is much more related to sadness than anger and so many of us have that sadness underneath our anger and underneath under other emotions.

I just, I just hope I have the courage to demonstrate the sadness and the feeling of it and the expression of it despite maybe losing a lot of people in my life if I do.

Because it can overwhelm people, it can overwhelm them. Some of us are so afraid of crying that we're afraid. We'll never stop.

That's not true. You'll stop. It's really hard to keep crying for too long. The body runs out of energy. It's really energy intensive to keep crying.

So, I don't know. I just, it seems to be one of the missing components. Just this expression of sadness. It brings us close together. Even imagining somebody else's situation, you know, I call it emotional combat. Imagining all the other conflicts in somebody's life brings sadness. If I think about somebody whose mom passed and he was waiting to see her and been 10 years and he tried to go grieve with his siblings and he can't because his visa got denied I feel sad I don't feel happy I don't feel grateful I don't I feel sad and it reminds me of just how hard life can be for me too and for other people and then I feel sad and it's okay not even okay it's could because I feel closer to other human beings. I feel closer to myself.

And if you're religious, if you're a monotheistic religion, you might say you feel closer to God or you feel closer to nature, closer to the universe, closer to whatever.

There is something magical about sadness and we.

Maybe it's because it's so powerful that we just deny it. we run away from it. Like I said, I think I feel somewhat okay being sad, feeling sad by myself. I'm still afraid of it, but I'm really afraid to do it in front of other people. Really afraid. It's ironic. I've worked on this stuff so long, but I just, I'm afraid of the repercussions. I'm afraid of people running away, pushing me away, distancing from me because of the sadness. When And sadness is supposed to bring people closer together. It's not supposed to distance.

When somebody dies, we grieve, we cry, we feel sad, and people come together, they hold each other. I have never cried more. I felt close to my dad. And after my mom passed, I put my head on my dad's chest. I can't remember the last time I ever did that. I cried. I did that this year. We went out to the gravesite just a couple weeks ago. I put my head on my dad's chest and I cried because the sadness doesn't go away. And that means we still love. That means we still live.

If we are not, I've said before, if we are not crying, we are dying.

I just hope, I hope I can help change this in the world. I hope I can have some impact, some influence, some ability to sway just one person at a time.

I have the courage to cry, to have the courage to feel sad. Because maybe we'll get there. Maybe we'll come back together. Maybe we'll get through the sadness and we'll get to the joy and the gratitude and the excitement of living.

I sure hope we do and I think we I think so many of us need it right now, so I hope you're able to make it through this I'll probably give a warning when I share the link again because of my fear I don't know if people want to go into sadness, even just hearing somebody be sad even if you don't know the person but somebody that you know really well crying.

Can make us feel sad. And if we have that meta-emotional reaction to sadness of fear, anger, or some other emotion that pushes it away, then, well, we might push that person away as well. And that's what I fear. But I hope maybe it'll bring us together at some point. I love you all. Take care.