Romanticism of Sadness//Guest Post by Gray

September 26, 2019

Gray accepted my offer to guest post and i can't wait for y'all to read it! Her post is beautiful and i love it!! Go check out her blog Sunshine and Joy if you haven't already!!!!

Hey all, Lia was so nice to invite me to guest post on here. I struggled for a while to find something worth writing for her, a topic worth exploring, and finally, I found it. This is kind of a rambling (sorry, Lia) but it's important and it's real.

I am tired of the romanticism of sadness.

I am tired of the "you look pretty when you cry" because I don't.

Don't tell me that it suited me, don't say that sadness or depression "suits" anyone, because it doesn't.

All of the YA books that paint these emotions to be glamorous are lying.

I'm not going to tell you that the nights I spent awake because my heart couldn't stop racing were romantic, they weren't.

I'm not going to soften the ringing in my airs, the pounding ache in my skull, and the bleary vision of my clock blinking 5 a.m., a nagging reminder that I wasn't well.

Looking in the mirror and not recognizing the girl in front of me and wanting to scream wasn't the teenage dream.

Sinking to a grimy bathroom floor, sobbing, feeling like I was going to die, wanting to die, wasn't beautiful.

Stop painting these things to be beautiful.

Dear reader,

I'm not going to tell you that your tears are made of stardust and shattered dreams because while poetic, they're not.

I'm not going to tell you that you are sorrow perfected, a constellation of sadness and longing formed into a person, because you're not.

You're human.

You're bones, ligaments, skin, hair, muscles. You are not your failures, you are not your mental illnesses, you are not your struggles, you are not the tears you do or don't cry, you are not even your dreams. You. Are. Human.

You are human and this is humanity. This is our fragility, and it's not beautiful, it's normal.

It's okay to be sad, it's okay to not be okay. Just don't let this become your identity, because it's not.

I don't know a lot, but I do know that you're still here and that I want you to stay.

I want you to stay despite life being hard because you're human and you matter.

You matter because the Creator of all made you, and He doesn't make mistakes.

You're human, my friend. And what do humans do? We keep going, we keep taking one step forward, we keep loving despite the bad stuff. Keep doing that, it's human.

All I know is that we are not our sadness, we are not our broken parts, we are not the scars on our arms or the ache in our hearts. We are so much more, so stop pretending that you're not.