So Sad Today: Personal Essays

by Melissa Broder

For if we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago. —Seneca

When you’re lonely and blacking out in strange places, you let other lonely people do what they want to you. You call it free love.

I am a superficial woman of depth.

What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just

disappear? Why can’t it just become something else?

When we think of our old lovers, and the people they are with now, we wonder what we did not have. We wonder collectively, as people, what other people have.

IS FAKE LOVE BETTER THAN real love? Real love is responsibility, compromise, selflessness, being present, and all that shit. Fake love is magic, excitement, false hope, infatuation, and getting high off the potential that another person is going to save you from yourself.

I think it’s okay to not be grateful for your curses. I think it’s okay to just want your blessings to be blessings.

What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.

For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet your anxiety. When there are no dramatic situations available, you turn the mundane into the dramatic.

My fear among people is that I will be judged for revealing what is going on inside me. I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.

Perfectionism, of course, is not the sole culprit in my anxiety and

depression. There is also chemistry, sensitivity, history, nurture, DNA, and questions existential and mystic—questions I have been discouraged from thinking about too hard, like, Why am I here? What is all of this? Am I going to die? Am I going to die right now? If I die right now, is that all there is? If I don’t die right now, is this all there is?

It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each ...