In the years leading up to my father’s death, he suffered. I know this because he didn’t hide it. I witnessed one of his worst days in the hospital one week after suffering a stroke. His potassium level dropped dangerously low, and the doctor decided to administer it intravenously through his forearm. I scanned my phone for information and learned that the arm is a nasty place to inject potassium. I found grown men online who reported having had to stop their infusion due to stinging pain in their arm. When the drip started, my father cried out ¡No me abusen! (“Don’t abuse me!”) ¡Sean buenas conmigo! (“Be good to me!”) ¡Por favor! (“Please!”). Hearing his cries made me want to vomit, and he didn’t stop until the drip finished. In his old age, my father lived by the rule “if it hurts, tell someone about it.”
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In contrast, when my mother was in the early stages of her death just three months after my father passed, her plan was to stifle her cries. Like a lot of people, my mom was raised on the belief that you shouldn’t burden people with your pain, and she understood full well that hearing her in physical agony would break my heart. Despite her resolve to shield me from her pain, one evening, as the caregiver was adjusting her body, my mom let out a cry. Immediately, she turned to me and said “I’m ok.” She had not been able to stifle that one, yet her first thought went to soothing me. My mother’s selfless act brought a knot to my throat, but it didn’t surprise me.
Many of us were raised on the belief that telling people about your pain puts a burden on them, so we end up telling everyone we’re fine when we’re dying inside. I used to think that masking your pain was noble; existentialist philosophy taught me otherwise.
Read more: Let’s Talk About Our Grief
Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wasn’t about to hide his suffering for the comfort of others. He wrote: “Whenever I have felt a pain I have shouted, and I have done it publicly.” Unamuno intended for his public cries to “start the grieving chords of others’ hearts playing.” Human hearts are like stringed instruments, he reasoned, and they can experience sympathetic resonance if they huddle close enough together. One bleeding heart can set off an entire symphony of compassion. We see it happen on deathbeds: When the power of positive thinking finally surrenders to breathing machines and ice chips, shared suffering can draw hearts into a sad embrace. When Unamuno’s six-year-old son died of meningitis, his grief was a catalyst for his fellow Spaniards to feel not sympathy but empathy, for him and each other. Unamuno told his readers that, although bodies use joy for connection, souls bond in sadness. Deep connection awaits us all, but it requires letting go of the idea that there is virtue in pretending we’re ok when we’re not.
Anyone experiencing a dark mood is faced with a choice: hide it from your loved ones or share it with them. If, like my mother, you believe that you shouldn’t announce your pain because it makes people feel helpless or burdened, then you’ll continue to hide your darkest moods from the people you hold dear. But if Unamuno was right that announcing your pain is a way of inviting people in, then my mother’s move to shield me from agony also kept me locked out of her sacred heart, whereas my father’s cries kept his heart open to me.
Of course, inviting a person to compassionately witness your dark moods is risky. In face, a student of mine at the University of Texas Rio Grande where I teach tested Unamuno’s theory. In an effort to forge deeper connections, she made herself vulnerable to the world, telling multiple people about her struggles. It did not go well, in part because the walls of U.S. society are still plastered with #nobaddays and #goodvibesonly. Under this regime, friends and loved ones get confused into thinking they’re meant to be cheerleaders, replacing our negativity with their positivity. Cheerleaders are those sweet people in our lives who remind us that we’re beautiful and strong when we’re feeling ugly or weak. “Don’t say that!” they counter at the first sign of self-doubt. “You’re going to get that job!” Cheerleaders feel responsible for making us feel better, which means that they perceive our dark moods as a problem, sometimes a puzzle.
Cheerleading often fails, but not because sufferers are addicted to negativity. When we hear “You got this!” instead of “I’ve been there” after we’ve disclosed something difficult, we can be left feeling lonely and misunderstood on top of sad or anxious. A nasty run-in with the bright side can give us a new reason for masking, not because we don’t want to burden our friends but because we don’t want them to pummel us with affirmations. We didn’t need to hear that it’s the company’s loss for not hiring us or that we’ll get the next one. In telling the truth, we were hoping that our people could remember what insecurity feels like and sit there with us, not stick their fingers in their ears and will our pain away.
What if humans are not responsible for making each other feel better? If everyone could agree that pain is inevitable and we are largely impotent against life’s losses, then fewer people might feel compelled to become cheerleaders. They could become confidantes instead. A confidante is the person we turn to when no one else gets it. They stay present when we tell the truth instead of trying to unlock our confidence. Without the pressure to be enthusiastic or offer words of wisdom, confidantes recognize that what we really need to know is that we are loveable even in our darkest mood, and they show us by showing up.
It’s not easy to be emotionally honest in a world that teaches its young to “be like a proton: always positive.” But the potential payoff of sharing dark moods with confidantes is huge: genuine connection, co-feeling, compassion, and a real sense that we are not the only one forging a path in this beautiful and terrifying world.