Fifty Shades of Grey
“Grey sadness is beautiful, but not to be confused with the beauty of blue sadness, which is irreplaceable. Sad to say, grey sadness is replaceable, it can be replaced daily, it is the sadness of a melting snowman in a snowstorm.”
The first time I thought about the colour of depression was while watching an episode of Fame, when I was in my mid-20s. Remember that show, the drama – and beautiful performances - of students attending a performing arts high school in New York? In the episode I’m thinking of, one of the students is feeling down and a teacher tells him – or her, I can’t quite remember, that the term feeling blue originates from blues music which has its roots in slave songs. Years later I learned that the term ‘feeling blue’ goes as far back as the 1300s. I had never before associated any colour with depression.
Since my early teens, I have suffered through episodes of deep darkness which at the time, I didn’t even know was depression. I would feel an abyss opening up and “silky tendrils would slink in and twist around my thoughts and memories, wrapping them in darkness”. I’ve referenced this quote before, lines from a Peter Robinson murder mystery, the best description I’ve ever read for what I experienced. At the time I didn’t perceive darkness as a colour, instead, it was a feeling, or more accurately a non-feeling that filled me with fear.
A few years ago I was diagnosed with dysthymia. Dysthymia is a low-grade depression that comes and goes, and my doctor thought I had probably had it since I was a pre-teen. It may possibly have been genetic but mental health was not anything my family talked about and that, combined with my own personal fear that there was something terribly wrong with me, meant I suffered in silence for far too long. I remember racing home after receiving my diagnosis and googling dysthymia. I don’t much like labels but I felt such a sense of relief to recognize myself in the symptoms listed.
I don’t get depressed very often these days, and certainly not to the extreme I remember from my younger years. I expect hormones, self-care, and extensive inner work all play a part in my improved mental health.
These days, and I think this may be age related, I am more likely to feel sadness, especially these last few months. Sometimes it feels like a cloud blocking the sun for a few minutes, or a gentle breeze that I hear approaching through the trees, and other times it is a profound feeling that hangs over me all day. There are any number of emotions that our English language does not have enough words for – love, grief, pain, sorrow; sadness is another of those words. I realize that when I tell a friend that I’m feeling sad, she really has no idea what I mean. And, while depression is characterized by darkness, there really is no one specific colour to describe sadness. I envision sadness in so many colours.
Earlier this month, I discovered Beyond the Blues: Poet Mary Ruefle’s Stunning Color Spectrum of Sadnesses, an article by the amazing Maria Popova from Brain Pickings. Popova suggests that sadness can occupy a vast spectrum of hues; sadness can be menacing — but it can also be beautiful and bountiful. She then shares Mary Ruefle’s colour palette of sadness from My Private Property, a collection of prose poems, meditations, divinations, and deviations. In her own poetic prose, Popova writes that Ruefle’s chromatic taxonomy of sadness cracks open the eggshell of our fragility to reveal within it a kaleidoscope coruscating with irrepressible aliveness. She then shares some of Reufle’s descriptions of the colours of sadness. My favourites?
Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe. It is possible to dance to purple sadness, though slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant. Purple sadness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world’s greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echoing down a long corridor, it is the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.
Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is the sadness of June, of shiny toasters as they come out of their boxes, the table laid before a party, the smell of new strawberries and dripping roasts about to be devoured; it is the sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers, decide who shall have their bunny when they die. Green sadness weighs no more than an unused handkerchief, it is the funeral silence of bones beneath the green carpet of evenly cut grass upon which the bride and groom walk in joy.
How beautiful are those words? I have danced to purple sadness; I have lived the confusing yellow sadness of the never-ending and the evanescent; and, I have felt the grey sadness of sand in the desert and sand on the beach. You will have to read the article to find out what colours resonate with you.
But there is a twist at the end of the article that leaves us with something to reflect on. Popova shares that in a tiny, dazzling author’s note tucked into the neglected end matter of the book for the discovery of only the most devoted and sensitive readers, Ruefle writes, “In each of the color pieces, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes”.