Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

You can’t outrun sadness because sadness is already everywhere. Sadness isn’t the visitor, you are.

Never overwater a succulent to try to get it to grow faster. It will not grow faster. You will drown its roots and the roots will rot and then the plant will die.

Sometimes, when something falls away naturally, it forms roots of its own.

I have taught myself to feel like I am constantly failing everyone around me because it pushes me to get things done.

The most productive years of my life so far have also been my loneliest.

nostalgia is to feel a happiness about something that is over because it is over.

I feel like I can only find peace within focused and defined time. Without a focus, all that undefined time causes me to freeze as I try to calculate and plan and decide in my head on what the most worthwhile thing to spend my time on would be, and then suddenly I look up and the day is over and I’ve squandered my day anyway, lost to the promise of potential.

There can be waiting and slowness built into the rest of it all, too. As if to say, It doesn’t all need to be so rushed.

We cannot seem to escape the desire to feel productive with our time. I’m not sure if that’s by choice or by trauma, that this pressure to produce has been so engrained in us that our deepest fantasies are still tied to some idea of working on something.

Perhaps after a life of working to no end with no promised outcomes, what we think we want more than anything is to escape into this fantasy that something reliable will happen when we put our time into it.

Perhaps one benefit (“benefit”?) of my anxiety is that at least I am unsurprised when things don’t turn out for the best.

Within this anxiety, every moment feels like spinning a roulette wheel. Am I: stressed, terrified, exhausted, EXCITED!, worried, worrying, INSPIRED!, stressed, upset, sad, overcome with guilt over letting people down, overcome with guilt for not working enough, EXCITED AGAIN!, worrying, exhausted, exhausted, exhausted?