Clown Class: Hot Mic

Hello and welcome to the new influx of Clown Class subscribers! Listen, uh, you’re walking in at a slightly intense moment here. Bear with me and I’m glad you’re reading.

content warning for my readers who need it: gentle, non-graphic talk about ideas of self-harm ahead

I got visited lately by a…what do I want to call it…a lacerating* sadness

*not what I really want to call it, lacerating is rough, but I needed something with some acid and thrust

and then I spoke about it publicly on Facebook and then came a hot shame chaser which made me want to throw myself down a well. Now I’m going to talk about these things here. I expect to walk around feeling like I’ve been set on fire for a few hours after I hit ‘publish’.

Hoo, mercy, is it ever a terrible flame that passes through me when I talk publicly about personal things sometimes. It’s an imperative that feels like an allergy. I do it, I become inflamed, the sensations die down, I do it again. It’s like I’m allergic to peppers but my job is to eat peppers and then I’m prescribed peppers for the allergic reaction.

Today is good, sadness-wise. Today it isn’t here, and yesterday it wasn’t here. Maybe it won’t be here tomorrow, either, or the day after.

What happened was: I got attacked out of nowhere by this acute, furious sadness, different from any sadness I’ve ever tried before. The sadness wasn’t there at all and then wham I was fully seized by it. The speed and force were shocking. This wild sadness had me for a few hours, then it let me go, then it came back.

I’ve felt sadness at this level of intensity in the last several months but that’s been grief. My mom died eleven months ago today. Grief is pure, though. This fucker is not. I did wonder if the sadness might be related to the anniversary of my mom’s death. The light outside is starting to look like it did when she was going. It could be related, I guess, but this sadness never even brings my mom up. This sadness has a different agenda.

The mom grief was gale force, a hollowing-out, a feeling like I’d been blown right off the planet, away from all the people I know, out into space. That grief was rough but it wasn’t personally unkind. It wasn’t out to get me, specifically, and it didn’t feel vengeful. Mortality is neutral. Everyone’s moms and everyone’s everyones and us, too, we’re all on the list. Mortality does its shitty work in a democratic, even-handed way.

This lacerating sadness, this attacking thing that struck, is very much personally unkind. Personal unkindness is its whole deal. This sadness is a bully who came to do damage. That’s why I’m bringing the matter to Clown Class. I know that when I describe this thing a little more, too many of you will recognize it.

The sadness goes right for the stomach. That’s where it goes first, before it goes to thoughts. Gut punch from nowhere. Hot stomach twist. Then the sadness goes for my thoughts. The sadness wants me to understand immediately and as hard as possible that I’m failing and that it’s too late for me to do anything else but fail. There is the suggestion from this aggressive sadness presence that it’s not particularly worth it for me to keep going. You never got it together, the attack-sadness says. Nothing indicates you’re going to get it more together than you have to date. You’re finished. You might as well be finished. Why draw this thing out? 

The attack-sadness shows me an invisible doorway and indicates that it’s much nicer on the other side. Nobody has to have it together on the other side of the doorway. Having it together is no longer a going concern. In fact, you go over there? Instant triumph. On that side of the doorway, the completion of being on this side of the doorway is total cause for celebration. A hero’s welcome is on deck, all the attendant joy. Best of all, rest, rest, rest. It’s okay that you failed this try. Everything will get really good really fast if you head out.

And, the attack-sadness further suggests, you wouldn’t have to be in this crumbling Earth plane any more, personal failure aside. It’s not a nice place now. It’s going to bits. 

Let me stop right here and say—me, Tina, and not this sadness—that I’m fine. I’m safe. I’m okay. I’m not in danger and you don’t have to worry. I’ve got wonderful firewalls.

First, I have a general sort of stamina for high sensation. I know how to hunker down and keep it loose, internally, in a general way, when the uncomfortable or painful feelings are running hot. I have a sense of myself as a strong and practiced person on that front. 

The most powerful firewall I have is my two sons. When the attack-sadness is yelling the loudest, I figure everyone else will work it out fine if I switch sides. They’ll be sad but they’ll recover and go on. I never figure the same for the boys, who will be men soon but who are not men, whom I will someday understand to be men but maybe never understand to be other than my babies. I’m not interested in hurting them and that’s final. 

I do understand that being a parent is not the firewall it seems like it is. I’ve only dealt with this visitor in short bursts. I haven’t had this cruel sadness hammering at me for years. I can imagine having my vision obscured about my children and the value of my presence if this experience went on at full force in an extended way. I know some of you know this too well from your own losses and I’m adding a hug to the pile for when you need it.

Firewalls or no, this sadness bit down for a spell. I didn’t know how long it was going to stay and I thought, since the sadness kept making this terrible suggestion, that I ought to mention it to people. I wrote a Facebook post about how I’d been feeling late last week to try and take the edge off. I didn’t text close friends or anyone because that was going to take too much out of me. No verve to talk or text it out. But I felt like I needed to say something and not just get quietly beat up by this thing or start drowning in the middle of a mall with shoppers a few feet in every direction. I figured I should at least announce my presence, grab a microphone, get some helpers looking my way.

Hello. Testing. Hello, mall. My name is Tina Rowley and I’m at the drowning kiosk. 

The next day the sadness had retreated and I felt much more normal but then I felt like an idiot for having gotten on the microphone. Way to go, dipshit. Get everyone’s attention—“I’m in deep water, folks”—and then when they look over I’m sitting on a bench ten feet from the drowning kiosk, not even wet. Hot, though! The shame! Very hot, very hot, what an idiot I am, my god.

But I did it, I posted about this sadness and heaps of lovely and embarrassing kindness came toward me in a steady stream from friends and acquaintances. I felt like a busker who’d had six or seven figures crammed into her hat but was still out there like HELP ME, GOOD SIR, I AM POOR. HERE IS A SAD AND TUNEFUL SONG. DON’T STOP FUNDING MY HAT. I hid the post yesterday so nobody else could see it and say something nice.

Along with this kindness came commiseration, lots of it. Many people reported that they, too, were in the grip of a terrible sadness. Why wouldn’t they be? Of course they are.

Of course we are.

One Facebook friend—an older Irish gentleman whom I do not know, the brother of an acquaintance, a person with whom I almost never converse—asked a question in Irish:

Tá brón orm?

I took this to Google Translate and saw two possibilities: 

Weapons are available?

And also

I’m sorry? 

I don’t know if he was saying he was sorry I was feeling sad in question form, like:

Am I sorry? Should I be sorry that you’re feeling sad? I’m ready to be sorry, I suppose, if necessary? 

The other option, the one that seemed more probable, was that he was discreetly trying to investigate whether I had a mode of exit handy.

Something about this question getting posed in Irish by a near-stranger across the globe touched me. The practicality, the discretion, the decision to pierce the distance and ask. His age and how I think his age shaped his question, kept it to the point. Weirdly beautiful, all of it, even while I was embarrassed to be asked.

After I posted (and before the shame of having posted went wild) I was glad I’d said something. I felt warm, comforted, like there was a hand on my heart. Well, there was a hand on my heart. That was my own hand. I kept putting my hand on my heart for ballast while this sadness was yelling at me. But I felt another palpable, warm something after I spoke up and all this love and concern came toward me. A blanket feeling, or a hand-on-my-back feeling. Something more like a physical sensation than an idea. When people send you love, something comes to see you that’s not just an idea.

To answer what I’ve decided was the man’s question, no. No weapons are available. I do have a mode of exit identified. Don’t a lot of us? The sadness bully roaming 2023 Earth is forward like that, making suggestions like some villainous concierge. But I have never taken steps to have that mode handy nor have I ever come close to taking those steps.

I don’t want to tell you how to live or what to do with your sadness. I don’t know your sadness, I don’t know how it moves. I do want to say that if you’re having the vicious sadness that tells you you’re a failure and you should get off the planet, getting on the microphone is worth it. The freaky heat of exposure isn’t fatal. It’s intense but inconsequential, like a stubbed toe

OH GOD, OW, NO, WHAT THE HELL, WHAT DID I DO

but then it passes.

Telling people you’re sad isn’t the thing that can kill you.

the artwork up top:

Qin Feng Desire Scenery Series - N.9, 2014