OPEN QUESTIONS // Feeling Good About Feeling Bad

The constant in all my inconsistency: Asking questions. You’re meant to ponder the prompts and queries in the OPEN QUESTION series in any way that feels good to you—like maybe in the comments section. (hint hint) As I always say though, don’t hurry to an answer. Not knowing is a rich and potent place. Savor it.

Say you were looking for a silver lining. Say you wanted to find something positive to hang on to or to run toward. Say you wanted to understand what heartache is good for.

In that scenario, one new-ish book that could take you on a tour of possible sterling shades and glittery outlines would be Bittersweet by Susan Cain. Check the subhead, “How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.”

Pulling in some interesting research + case studies/examples, and winding them around journalistic storytelling, Cain pretty convincingly demonstrates how the hollowed-out yearning that fills us after death and loss is actually a kind of asset. An advantageous serendipity—if we want it to be. The idea is that the hole we feel, the chasm that can define us, serves to powerfully connect us to our desire and creative potential. That it’s our longing that pulls us forward.

Contrast that image with the archetype of that happy-go-lucky guy who “has it all” but fills his days with mindless productivity + meaningless positivity, sleepwalking his way through a stuff-based existence. Meanwhile, we who are grieving desire a better world; a world with more love, more connection, more meaning … and, inside the tug of that desire, we make/speak/sculpt/write/paint/sing that better world into existence. Necessity being the sacred, benevolent, grief-filled mother of invention and all that.

If you’re out there pumping the breaks going, but wait, wait it isn’t that easy, don’t worry. No one, including Cain, says it is. She knows that culture (the patriarchy, capitalism, et al) doesn’t encourage us to feel the power of our pain or to understand the sweetness of that which is so bitter. Culture doesn’t even encourage us to feel.

Which is why she wrote the book.

Fairly early on in the text, Cain shares a study wherein one group of subjects goes through a series of controlled steps and then encounters a rewarding outcome. A second group of subjects goes thru a similar series of controlled steps—but theirs yields an unsatisfying, bummerific, comfortless, alienating conclusion. Next, both groups move into a laboratory art studio of sorts to make collages which are later observed and analyzed by a group of artists.

Whose collages do you think were rated higher?¹

That stuck with me every time I cracked open the spine on Bittersweet. My whole life I’ve seesawed between a faux-romantic attachment to depression (“it’s what makes me write”), and the knowledge that that slippery slope has put many beautiful downers into early graves.

But Bittersweet has me thinking that maybe bittersweetness is something different.

So, here’s what I wanted to ask you:

• Would you be willing to accept yourself as exceptional—precisely because of what you do not have?

• What would it mean to use your longing to connect more deeply to your expression?

• How would it honor everyone you love and all that you’ve lost to hear the essential brilliance of your voice? To see the inherent excellence of your hand? To love the obvious intelligence of your ideas?

1. And okay, sure, we could debate “rating” art. But I think we’ve all seen good collages (and whatever else), and then better ones.