Is it okay to be sad?
We live in a world where happiness constitutes the Holy Grail. Whenever we send wishes to someone, we mostly wish for them to be happy. And while most people acknowledge that there’s more to life than being happy, some of them still feel like a failure when they’re sad. They think something’s wrong with them, especially when they’re told that they shouldn’t feel this way.
In a well-meaning attempt to make them feel better, people will remind them that they’re lucky, that they have everything they need – health, an education, an average income, etc. – and that they should be counting their blessings instead of feeling inadequate. But the truth is that physical wellbeing is not the same thing as mental wellbeing, and that both are equally important.
As bestselling author Matt Haig sums it up: “If the modern world is making us feel bad, then it doesn’t matter what else we have going for us, because feeling bad sucks. And feeling bad when we are told there is no reason to, well, that sucks even more.” Mental health problems are still very much stigmatized in the Arab world and are therefore not always easy to talk about.
Yet feeling sad can be a chance – and dare we say it a sign of good health. It can be a call to change some of our thoughts and attitudes that are draining us and to live a more authentic life, in keeping with our values and principles. Feeling sad forces us to slow down so we can realize we’ve been heading in the wrong direction and should be seen as an opportunity to course correct.
Feeling sad makes us reflect on the way we’ve been living our lives and on the charges we’ve been carrying for too long without questioning them. Maybe we’ve done this to make someone else happy, or just thinking it would make someone else happy. Maybe we just thought it was the only way to go. And then one day we realize that we don’t want to keep going on like this.
And we embark on a quest to find out what we truly want and need, to develop our unique talents and to embrace our destiny, which may be different from what we thought it would be. Only then can we start feeling truly happy in our own personal way. And be grateful to our occasional feelings of sadness for keeping us on the path that’s right for us.
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