Every once in awhile my heart sinks into a place of melancholy that no one knows about. It doesn’t happen often and when it does it is only when I am alone and darkness has settled and the people I love are tucked away in their space, living their own struggles or enjoying their own peace. It’s a process I know all too well because it has happened to me at different times in my life and if I allow it to take its course it fades away as swiftly as it came.

I get very quiet, put my headphones on, and shut out the night around me and allow myself to go deep in my thoughts, and as I listen to a soft song of heartache I begin to feel tears streaming down my face as I simultaneously begin to work on a task. Cleaning something, putting things away, whatever my hands can find to keep busy while I let the emotions flow. Sometimes I feel I don’t know words to0 well, but feelings/emotions, those are powerful sensations for me. And as I hit repeat several times on the same set of songs, I feel the melancholy of the music, sometimes the words are about things I have felt in my past and sometimes they aren’t, but the emotion that is evoked in the music seems to carry the sadness that is flowing out of my heart.

I know it may sound like a very sad process, but what I am doing is cleansing my heart because by allowing myself that time I begin to feel peace pushing the sadness out and there comes a point where I know that I am breaking past that feeling because my body begins to need to hear something different because my emotion is changing and with it the need that I have to feel better.

You would never know throughout my day that this moment is coming for me in the evening because I carry on and I laugh and I converse and I share and I enjoy those around me, yet I know what is coming once it is just me alone with my feelings and the night. I call this my dark side of happy because while I know that I have much to be thankful for and so many blessings, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have these moments, moments like maybe many others out there, and I don’t want to pretend that they don’t exist for me either. And while sometimes it’s true that it’s best not to worry and wonder, there are times when I know I need to allow my body to feel and let go, because in the end I know that I return to the lighter side of happy.