I write about sad things.

But I don't think I'm a sad person.

Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…

Last week, my dad called me.

This doesn’t happen often. When I do hear his voice on the phone, it’s usually while I’m FaceTiming my mom as he walks through the room on his way to finish up a woodworking project or to pick some herbs from the garden in the backyard of their South Carolina home. But this time, he had called to chat, a move that was very unlike him. He is a man of few words, so I’ve learned to listen closely when he speaks.

Before he retired, my dad was an engineer, but I like to imagine that he was a renowned author in his former life. Though no one would accuse him of being chatty, he has a lot to say. He just happens to save these thoughts for his journal, which he updates in his trademark, matter-of-fact style nearly every day.

So, when my dad mentioned that he had been reading my newsletter, I was pleasantly surprised and eager to hear his thoughts, both as a writer and as his daughter who still seeks out his approval, even as an adult. I knew I could count on him to be honest.

And he was. In one succinct sentence, he delivered his verdict. “Reading your newsletter made me kind of sad.”

Well. Of all of the words I’d associate with Everyday Woo, sad was not high on the list…or on it at all. I mentally audited my last few posts, and I realized that my father was right: my writing does tend to explore the melancholy side of life. Damn, I thought to myself. Was my writing making those who read it sad? And, more largely, was I just…a sad person?

I have not lived what I would describe as a sad life. My parents are still married. I watched the Price is Right every morning at 10AM in the summer with a bowl full of Cheez Its and caught lightning bugs when the sun went down. In fact, parts of my childhood were downright idyllic, almost nauseatingly so: I remember regular family bike rides on a trail to a tiny snow cone stand that sat alongside the path, a scene that sounds like it belongs in a Disney movie montage.

Any moments of sorrow I endured while growing up were what I called sad-adjacent experiences. I can clearly remember my Meemaw’s funeral when I was 10 and detachedly observing as her casket was lowered into the ground at the cemetery down the road. Later that evening, I held a stuffed animal that she had given me, looked out of my window at the night sky and tried to cry because I thought I was supposed to.

I’d only ever seen grief acted out in movies and in the pages of books, represented by single tears streaking down cheeks and gut-wrenching sobs. Having done neither when the final shovel of dirt was placed at the funeral, I decided that now was my chance to truly feel sadness for myself, not as some second hand experience. I squeezed the stuffed tiger, stared hard at the stars and thought of all of the things that made me sad: abandoned kittens, natural disasters, hungry children. I had no past sorrowful personal experiences to draw on, so I thought of my grandmother, cold in the ground, trapped in the narrow space of the coffin. But I didn’t cry.

I knew that I should feel something, but my sadness was watered down, like some low budget version of sorrow. Truthfully, I hadn’t known my grandmother very well.

For the first part of my life, sadness was intriguing in the way that tornados wreaking havoc at a distance are fascinating: you can’t tear your eyes away, but you are glad it isn’t happening to you.

I collected this kind of sadness. My bookshelves were lined with tearjerker historical fiction diaries on tragic topics like the sinking of the Titanic. In high school, I’d showcase my angst on my AIM away status with borrowed lyrics from bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Dashboard Confessional. And throughout college, I read and reread the dark works of Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath, preferring to escape the mundane Midwest in search of something that felt bigger than the familiar lines of the corn fields that surrounded me.

Each song that made me cry and every tragic ending to a novel was another curiosity to add to my stash. If at any point it all became too much, I could easily slip back into my very not-sad life and immerse myself in the soft edges of shopping malls, home-cooked dinners and family game nights.

Sadness was something I could choose to dabble in. Like someone’s weird but robust collection of frog figurines or the abandoned hand-knitted sweater at the thrift store, I liked to look at these feelings and occasionally try them on. I just didn’t want to own them.

In 2020, my life took a dramatic turn from balanced and boring to chaotic and traumatic. I felt like all of the Really Sad ™ experiences had been saved up and given to me all at once: a divorce, a health scare, the death of my beloved cat, an abusive relationship, and a pandemic to round it out. I was 32 years old and experiencing grief firsthand for the first time…and it was anything but fascinating. Unlike when I was younger, I didn’t need to force myself to cry. Now, I cried with abandon, the list of places where I had sobbed expanding with each passing day: the pasta aisle in the grocery store. The cat rescue where I volunteered. On the floor of my bathroom.

This kind of sadness wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t fodder for cringey emo lyrics. It wasn’t an emotion that could be held at a distance and analyzed, like a hovering balloon that I could choose to let go of at any time. This kind of sadness stayed. It was lonely. Embarrassing. Heavy. Constricting.

For once in my life, I abandoned my sadness collection. I stopped reading much of anything at all, and when I did, I only picked up the fluffiest books because my brain just couldn’t handle the heavy Zadie Smith novels and David Foster Wallace essays I used to consume regularly. I listened to frothy pop music (Carly Rae Jepsen was my choice) and spent hours scrolling through subreddits about skincare and plants, easy topics that didn’t require me to think about my own grief.

In the moments where the sadness wriggled its way back into my head, I chased it away. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to think about it. I just wanted this awful feeling to disappear. But paradoxically, the more I tried to ignore my sorrow, the more it clung to me.

No longer was I a person who was merely interested in sad things. I had become a sad person.

Last week, I passed one of the many cemeteries here in St. Louis on my morning commute. The sun was shining for the first time in days. As I drove, I felt a familiar pull, and I turned my head to drink in the stillness that lay just feet from the urgent, busy road.

Early spring had amplified stark contrast between the living and the dead: curious fingers of grass reached up to caress the inanimate sides of the headstones, their white, spongy texture reminding me of the mushrooms that Sylvia Plath wrote about. Sunlight caught the flecks of quartz buried in the stone, lending a bit of magic to the scene.

Cemetery With a New Grave. Gabriele Münter, 1908.

It was still early, but a man was in the cemetery, cutting the still-damp grass back with a weedeater. Though I couldn’t make out his features, I could tell by his body language that he was happy. He moved with ease, expertly trimming around each gravestone before dancing off to the next.

He treated every resting place with reverence, and he did so joyfully. In the few seconds that I watched him work in a place that is almost universally labeled as sad, I felt an unexpected sense of hope trickle into me.

I am now two years removed from the onset of true sadness in my life. After ignoring it for so long, there came a point where there was nothing left to do but to revisit the gravesites of my grief. My sadness wasn’t going anywhere. If I looked hard enough, I could find it just about anywhere I turned. And when I saw it, I didn’t know what else to do but to write about it.

I think about this newsletter and wonder if it is it possible to talk about the sad things in life without being a sad person. Can I move amongst the gravestones of life in a way that is hopeful? I think so. Sorrow is complex. Just as an epitaph inscribed on a headstone cannot hope to completely capture the life of the person who is buried beneath it, there is more to the story of my sadness if I choose to look at it closely.

To do so doesn’t mean slipping under the dirt to lie with the dead, to bury myself in the past and its moments of pain. I prefer to dance amongst the living and the deceased at the same time, seeking to understand the curves of each tombstone of my sadness. In my writing, I want to explore the contrast of the verdant grass against the stone of sorrow and discover the hope that is found where the two meet.

So I guess my dad is right: my newsletter is sad. But I am not a sad person. I am a person who chooses to read the epitaphs stamped across the graves of my sadness and rewrite them, turning them into soaring sonnets dedicated not only to my healing but yours, too.

I can’t promise that reading Everyday Woo will make you happy. But my hope is that it will help you look at yourself with honesty and love the person you see. Sadness and all.

Do you choose to look at your sadness closely, or do you prefer to focus on what feels happy?

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✨Cards for Humanity: The Five of Cups✨

Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.

No use in crying over spilled milk, er, cups…right? That’s one way to read the rather dismal-looking Five of Cups, a card that is decidedly sad. The protagonist of this scene exudes misery from his black cloak (a sign of mourning) to his sorrowful body language. His downturned gaze is fixated on the overturned cups at his feet, their contents spilled out and no longer viable.

For a long time, I thought that this card was all about moving on. Time to pick yourself up and get over those big feelings. After all, once you turn around, there’s two new upright cups for you to pour into. Yay!

These days, having experienced multiple Five of Cups moments, I kind of see this card differently. The cups behind the figure aren’t ones to turn around and move towards; they’re the beauty that is found in the contrast between what has ended and what is beginning. The river that stretches out ahead indicates the direction to head: to arrive back at the city in the distance, which represents the self, the figure must wade through the waters of emotion.

The bridge in the distance can represent a portal, or a rite of passage in the querent’s life, but I also see it as an option for how to move past the sadness in life. Man-made or tangible approaches to dealing with pain (therapy, writing, exercise) are other options for crossing the emotional waters, but they, too, require approaching what is sad.

To me, the message of this card isn’t simply to get over what feels sad. It’s also not to stand still and become mired in the muck of sadness. It’s to give yourself permission to feel it, to acknowledge what good has come from this moment (though this can be hard to turn around and see), and to ultimately return home to the city of oneself.

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✨Prompts | The Five of Cups✨

Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.

☀️ Where in my life do I need to mourn what has been spilled?

☀️ How can I reconnect with myself by exploring my sadness?

☀️ What beauty can I find when I truly look at my sadness?

☀️ How can I create space for healing while examining the difficult side of life?

A poem to represent the Five of Cups.

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✨Weekly Mantra✨

Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.

My sadness does not define me, but choosing to see it helps me understand myself.

I’m taking a short break to celebrate my birthday and my cousin’s wedding. Tuesday’s newsletter will resume on 5/24. See you then.