Patch Notes: Serotonin.io (Still Not Fixed)

I used to have a lot of sadness as a kid. A deep, heavy sadness that I didn’t know what to do with. Because I didn’t know, I spent years thinking something was fundamentally wrong with me. Here’s the thing nobody tells you: you can have a decent life and still feel like you’re drowning. People look at you and see someone who’s doing fine, thriving even and you start to think you’re broken for feeling the way you do. Like there’s some defect in you that makes you incapable of being happy when you’re supposed to be. I couldn’t enjoy melancholy, itmade me deeply uncomfortable. I avoided sad songs, quiet, eerie music, anything that might crack something open inside me I couldn’t control. I was terrified of what would happen if I let that crack widen. Those sounds felt like they would split me apart, and I wasn’t ready to find out what would spill out. I didn’t really listen to music until the day I heard my dad playing “The Real Slim Shady.” and something clicked. After that, I gravitated toward angry music, rock, metal, profanity-filled hip-hop tracks. Rage felt safer than sadness. Anger has direction, purpose. You can do something with anger. Sadness just sits there, heavy and shapeless, and I didn’t know what to do with something I couldn’t fight or fix.Because that’s what I was trying to do, constantly: fix myself. Fix the sadnessGet rid of itBecome the person I thought I was supposed to be the cheerful, expressive exterior everyone saw. The thing is, I was and still am a very cheerful and expressive person, I also get incredibly emotional. Outwardly bright, inwardly heavy. I tried to ignore the sadness, hoping it would disappear. But it didn’t, It grew with me. And recently, it grew on me. Living with that contradiction felt like proof I was doing something wrong. How can you be genuinely joyful and genuinely sad at the same time? How can you laugh easily with friends while carrying something impossibly heavy? I thought I had to choose one or the other, that I had to resolve this somehow. That there was a version of me where the sadness wouldn’t exist anymore and I’d finally be whole. I had an interesting experience in College,I made a friend who enjoyed melancholy. It was mindboggling. I deeply admire this friend, by the way, but at the time I couldn’t wrap my head around it. How do you sit with sadness without drowning? How do you listen to aching music without feeling swallowed alive? I realize now what I couldn’t see then: they weren’t fighting it. They weren’t treating feelings like problems to solve or enemies to defeat. They were just… letting them exist. My feelings, the emotional weight behind my thoughts, were overwhelming. I never liked them. I was afraid that if I let myself feel the sadness fully, I’d get stuck there forever. That if I stopped running, stopped distracting, stopped numbing myself with anger and humor and anything that wasn’t the feeling itself, I would dissolve into it completely. So I kept moving, kept avoiding, kept trying to outrun something that was inside me. I’m a couple years older now, and I’m learning to let it be. To sit with it. To feel sadness without judgment. I’ve come to realize I was starving myself of a fully realized life experience. By trying to avoid discomfort, I was also avoiding depth, richness, connection. I was trying so hard to cut out the sad parts of being human that I was cutting out huge swaths of what makes life feel real and textured and full. Dr K* says that you have to learn how to sit with the discomfort. And he’s right. Not fix it, not solve it, not make it go away just sit with it. Let it be there. Because here’s what I’m learning: feelings aren’t problems. They’re not malfunctions. They’re not evidence that you’re broken or doing life wrong.They’re just part of being alive. Sadness, joy, anger, peace, they all get to be here. They can coexist. You can be cheerful and sad. You can be expressive and heavy. You don’t have to pick one and exile the other. You don’t have to fix anything. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different if I’d learned earlier that the lack of discomfort does not automatically equal happiness. If someone had told me that I didn’t need to change myself, that my feelings were normal, more than that, that they’re a part of me but not all of me, and that it’s okay to just feel them. But that’s just another round of what-ifs. What I know now is this: the sadness doesn’t go away because I ignore itIt’s still hereBut I’m learning to let it be here, to sit with it instead of running. And somehow, that makes everything else feel more real too. If you’re reading this and feel broken because you can’t “fix” your feelings, because you’re sad even when life looks fine, because you’re exhausted from trying to be someone who doesn’t feel so much, you’re not alone. You’re not weirdYou’re not doing it wrongYou were never supposed to fix you at all.

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