I am sad sometimes. Actually, I get really sad sometimes. Sometimes I get really sad for a long time. I also get really happy a lot of the time. There’s not a huge in between. I don’t think I’ve been completely telling the truth and I wonder if I’m doing anyone a service by expressing mainly moments of personal happiness and rarely of personal sadness. My Instagram jumps from one happy moment to the next. My twitter usually jumps from one “witty” thought to the next. I rarely document any sort of misery for social media to see unless it can make other people laugh. I don’t document the casual moments, the difficult days; I don’t post about mental breakdowns on Facebook even though they can sometimes start to rule my life. And if I’m being honest, I’ve been in places lower than I can even wrap my head around at this point in my life, but I don’t know who I’d be without having been in those places. I’m displaying my life on a surface level social media page, but I’m skipping a lot of parts. My social media pages are, for the most part, the odds and ends of an often uncomfortable, cyclically depressing, sometimes manic life. They’re the parts that hold me together, but they’re not really me. And the reason I’m getting into this right now is because winter can sometimes be really hard for me, and as I understand, for a lot of people. It’s so gloomy and cold, and it seems all the bad stuff happens in the winter. But you probably wouldn’t notice that from social media, because most of us are posting about our amazing lives and crazy adventures. I love spreading positivity, but it can often be discouraging to scroll through pages of lives you could be living, happiness you could be feeling but just can’t seem to reach. It can be overwhelming. But we’re so much more complicated than our social media pages. When I decided I wanted to write for real, that I actually wanted to be a writer and pursue something people often regard as insignificant, I promised myself I’d tell the absolute truth to anyone who reads my writing. I came across some James Baldwin journals, and I started to more deeply understand that thing inside me telling me to write. Baldwin writes: Most people live in almost total darkness… people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which — if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define — you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope — because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad. Hymns don’t do this, churches really cannot do it. The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything…It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go — everything, and this forever, forever. So I guess I’m just here to tell you the truth for a second. I get really sad sometimes. Lots of people get really sad sometimes. And when you’re scrolling through your social media and wondering why everyone looks so god damn happy all the time but you just can’t seem to feel it, know that they suffer too. Maybe not as much, maybe not in the same way, maybe even a little more. You don’t always see it, but everyone suffers and everyone’s hurting over something. And the point isn’t to hide it, or to outdo someone’s suffering or to outdo someone’s happiness, but to connect through it. As much as we can connect through our successes—by bragging about promotions or GPA’s on Facebook and receiving a message of congratulation from aunts and uncles we haven’t spoken to in months— we understand each other more by being vulnerable with our sadness, by lending it to others and letting them receive it as humans. I think as a society we have so much to achieve in terms of understanding suffering. No one is struggling alone, but we seem to compare our struggles and our successes in such a way that we isolate ourselves. And I’m recently finding that the best way to not feel alone in suffering is to share your full, true self with those around you. I don’t see any other way besides connection. I am sad sometimes. Sometimes, I’m very sad for a very long time. And I don’t need to talk about it all the time—because I do see the amazing things we all post on Facebook and keep in the backs of our minds— but I’d still like to talk about it, because I just don’t see any other way.

If anyone is interested in writing articles and getting some work published, let me know! I have a great opportunity for writers and open-minded, opinionated thinkers! Send me a message (:

Hi! I made a new blog for my writing, because this one is kind of messy and I want a place to show people my real work. danifruehan.tumblr.com -- I won't be using this one much anymore so you should go follow that (: