I host Sad Parties for people to be sad together
A.
“Now I open the space up for something I call open mic without a mic and offer you the most precious gift — our attention. You can jump inside the circle and do anything you want for around 5 minutes. You can straight up cry, tell a story, sing a song, or you can also do something such as addressing an audience as if someone from your life, as I am about to demonstrate.” I spoke to my roomful of guests, all sitting on floor cushions in a circle, waiting for instructions of what’s happening next in this gathering.
“Who wants to be my volunteer?” I asked, and several people raised their hands. I picked Lucy, who’s one of my close friends and we moved to the center of the circle.
“I am going to talk to Lucy as if she’s the younger parts of Michelle.” I literally came up with this idea as I was speaking. Several of my close friends came to my Sad Party tonight for their first time and I wanted to make sure we do this last part right and not disappoint them. After the first and second part, I felt like the mood of the crowd still needed some dropping in. Maybe by taking the lead I could shift the emotions in the room.
Looking at Lucy straight in the eye, I started talking on the top of my head.
“I remember when Mom came to the bakery on her last day in town and said to Justin, ‘Michelle looks very outgoing and bubbly on the outside but she’s actually very sensitive on the inside’, I hated it.
“I hated that Mom knew me so well and wanted to take off my mask. I hated that label, sensitive, just as how much I hated and rejected that part of myself, you.” Tears run down my face just naturally as I utter those words.
“You used to love spending time by yourself. Roaming in your curiosities and imaginations, burying yourself in books, movies and your own stories, you were the happiest when you were alone. That’s the time when you can forget about judgments and expectations and surrender to your inner world. I was proud to be unique, but I was also so needing to be popular that over time the need for validation shut down the voice of sensitivity. Now I pushed you so far away I can’t even spend time alone anymore without being anxious and needing distraction anymore. I changed so much, and I don’t like that I pushed you away, because I am only complete with you.”
“I miss you.”
More tears came down as I announced my loneliness in front of a roomful of close friends and strangers.
“I hope you can come back.
“I am making space for you to come back.
“I welcome you to come back.”
I wiped my face, quickly turn to the guests, switched to a relieved tone and said: “And this is how you do it.” Some people smiled.
B.
This is Sad Party, an event I host trying to provide a safe space for people to release their negative emotions. Over the past year over a hundred guests have come to four iterations of this three hour event. Through a series of facilitated relating games, movement, and storytelling activities, we give our amorphous inner pain an outlet of expression. As we acknowledge and enunciate our own suffering, we confront the reality of collective suffering and forge connection and compassion.
Sounds like a great idea right? Why did this not exist before? Huh, I wonder too.
Spending my life in modern Chinese and American cultures, I struggled to find a safe space where I could allow and embrace my full range of emotions, especially the ones on the darker side. As a kid I developed the habit of burying my face in a pillow and wailing so that my parents wouldn’t hear me, as a teen most of my social life consists of being part of some performative art group like singing and theater where my yelling and crying on demand were seen as a talent not a flaw, and as an adult, I threw myself at emotionally crippled men in exchange for drama and emotional roller coaster in the game of chase and withdrawal. (High five myself).
Until one day in 2018, after three months of hiding in my room or in the office bathroom sobbing for another unavailable lover, I finally became fed up with my shame around crying. I hated having to pretend that I was happy, hated secretly wanting support and company but dreaded asking for it, hated the social part of me internally judging the crying part of me, tearing my personalities apart and disowning the vulnerable self. I decided to allow myself to be seen as sad.
I posted on Facebook about wanting to find people to be sad together. A friend reached out and we cried over talking about our grandparents. I went to burning man and did a bunch of workshops. I mixed a couple of my favorite activities and hosted the first Sad Party. It’s funny that I didn’t actively invite any friends on the event page because I was so scared of being judged. Still, random people came and it was not as disastrous as I had thought. I hosted it again after three months. And again. And again.
C.
I don’t believe that we should tell or make sad people “feel better“. By minimizing or distracting our pain, the forced injection of positivity only works temporarily to anesthetize us. It ignores the part of us that yearns to be heard, to be held and to belong. Maybe sad people don’t want to “think about the bright side“, maybe sad people don’t believe you’ve gone through worse, maybe sad people are really tired and have no desire to read that self-help book that transformed lives. Maybe at this point when she feels desperate and lonely, she just wants us to hold space for her.
Breakup. Self-hate. Assault. Suicide. War. Failure. Separation. Adulting. These are stories Sad Party guests have chosen to share. When I listen to their stories and know their shadows, I face the brutal truth that I am not alone in my sufferings. I could not simply tell myself that I am the saddest, the weirdest, the outcast, the invisible anymore. The voice in my head became quieter and the loving-kindness in my heart became stronger.
It’s a strange contrast how easy it is for me to have compassion for friends and strangers and how hard it is for me to have that for myself. Every time people show up and open up, yet every time I worry about if the event was too much, was not enough or poked some wounds and made people feel worse. I then spend the next few nights brooding over my inability to heal all traumas or stop all suffering. When this happens, I let the inner critic scream at me, let the other voices argue with it and laugh.
“You are torturing yourself again.” “You did your best.” “You can’t manage people’s feelings.” The voice sounds familiar.
It’s the voice who said “fuck it” and decided to enter a relationship despite fear of messing it up and being left alone, the voice who told me to “just write like how you journal” and hit the publish button in the face of all the internalized judgements of my craft and my lifestyle, the voice who wrote down “I’m willing to risk loving and being loved” on a card and sticked it on the wall in front of my desk so that I could remind myself every day that I always have a choice, to either continue rejecting my thoughts and desires and retreat to the corner of being a victim and shame, or step into the expansive unknowable territory of making decisions and taking actions and asking for things that serve me.
One of my close friends from college passed away from cancer yesterday. As I am typing this piece, I could only think of images of her laughing, performing, talking vivaciously with her Beijing accent and marching towards her destinations. How she would check herself out in the mirror in my dorm by twisting her slim waist, then check me out and announce that we look good. How she would grab me by the arm and shout “let’s go” and take me to a night of dance and glamor instead of hiding in my room. She always had glittery eyes, colorful lenses, flamboyant liners, and confident heels. When I mirrored her smile in our selfies I looked the happiest out of all my pictures from that difficult four years.
Let me remember you as the girl that shows up as her unapologetic self and tells her friends that they are beautiful. Let me embody your spirit by never holding myself back from stepping out of my shell and letting the world see my beauty.
D.
Occasionally, when people I just met ask me “So what do you like to do?” I find my voice a little shaky, as I could totally talk about dancing or writing, but I don’t know how they will react when I say ”well I host Sad Parties for people to be sad together.”
Yet I do it anyway, because this might be another human that could use some space to let their emotions out, and because I venerate my too-muchness with an ever-renewing vow to love and accept my beings and doings that had been previously dismissed by myself.
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In loving memory of Aries Cui
