The Bittersweet Symphony of Life

From my melancholy heart to yours.

In college, friends described my taste in music as “wrist-slitty,” which today I find a bit offensive, making light of suicide and all, but is the kind of thing people said in the early aughts when we weren’t all nearly as sensitive with our words. I knew what they meant, except that sad music doesn’t make me sad. Not exactly, anyway.

I’ve always been drawn to sad music, movies, and books. I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a tragic love story which also somehow perfectly captures the way heartbreak can be worth every ounce of pain, so much so that you would do it all over again in a heartbeat. And almost no other song for me captures the beauty and misery of unrequited love as does Bon Iver’s rendition of I Can’t Make You Love Me. I could listen to that song a million times (and probably have).

But it’s not just pure sadness that appeals to me and to so many others; it’s what Susan Cain calls the bittersweet — “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.”

I’ve noticed this tendency toward the bittersweet in myself for a long time, even when I didn’t have the words for it, much less a coherent explanation for why. But Cain’s words have given me a deeper appreciation for this way of being, and for the ways in which it helps me cope with the inescapable and often harsh realities of being a human being.

“Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life—and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we aren’t simply happy: “We’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive.”
— Susan Cain, Bittersweet

I’ve always thought of myself as a deep feeler, and I’ve come to see this ability to appreciate and linger on the bittersweet as an adaptive coping mechanism. If pain and suffering are inevitable, then the question becomes how we deal with it. One common approach is to try to ignore it, to deny our own discomfort and sadness because we worry we’ll be swallowed up by it. The problem, of course, is that we then cause ourselves a host of other mental and physical ailments as our bodies try and fail to live with such cognitive dissonance, and deny our emotions the outlet they need to pass. In an effort to protect ourselves, we can become cold, closed off, out of touch with ourselves and with others.

On the other end of the spectrum we can give in to despair; we can let ourselves feel everything all at once and wallow in the futility of it all, too paralyzed to do anything about it. The world can be a dark place, so a part of me sympathizes with this nihilistic outlook. And yet, it also feels self-indulgent — immature, like a child throwing a tantrum. At some point in our lives, we must outgrow the instinct to dramatize and seek attention, and take responsibility for ourselves and our lives. We must grow up.

And so it seems to me there is a middle path, a way of seeing the world as it is, of acknowledging the pain and the suffering, and making our peace with it. Not by pushing it away, or denying its power over us, but by fundamentally recognizing that “light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired,” to quote Cain once again.

People say relationships are hard, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that life is hard, and that relationships are at the heart of being human and are thus inescapably bittersweet.

Dan Harris, news anchor turned mindfulness and relationship enthusiast, often shares bite-sized words of wisdom from his own life, and a recent one made this point perfectly. Harris shares advice he received about how to get through particularly difficult moments in our lives; in his case the example was around dealing with the changing relationships and challenges of caring for his aging parents. His friend’s advice was to “find the sweetness in it,” which struck me as such a simple and wise way to put it — a reminder that bitter and sweet go hand in hand, and that when all we can see is the bitter, we need a nudge to also notice the sweet.

This bittersweetness is everywhere. It’s in everyday moments like when I drop off my son at school and he scurries along without so much as a glance back, making it seem like ages ago when he couldn’t bear to separate, and reminding me that in a blink he’ll be off to college. And it’s in the big moments too, like the blurry haze of sheer terror and overwhelming love that follows the birth of a first child.

A few years ago my husband was diagnosed with cancer, and the months that followed were undoubtedly the hardest of our lives (by a wide margin). Those were truly one foot in front of the other type of days, where just getting through the day often felt like the only win we were going to get. And yet, even then, the sweetness seeped in through the cracks.

There was a sweetness, for me, in being able to take care of him, whether that meant being his healthcare advocate against the mind-numbing bureaucracy that is healthcare, making him smoothies so he’d eat something, or simply sitting by his side, reading in silence for hours while he tried to rest, so he wouldn’t be alone.

There was sweetness, too, in the way our friends and community showed up for us. I’d get unexpected text messages from friends of his I didn’t even know that well, offering to do anything and everything if it would lighten the load. One offered to take our car to get an oil change, which had the exact effect I imagine he intended of making me laugh, and making his point: I’m here for whatever. And this is one of Cain’s main arguments:

This connection with the inevitable pain and sorrow of life is an opportunity for connection, because “if we realize that all humans know — or will know — loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.” 

The way I see it, we have a choice when life throws us a gut punch: we can harden, building up walls, getting defensive, trying to protect ourselves by keeping everything and everyone out. Or we can soften, and let the hardship teach us the lesson it was meant to teach us, and through the pain develop a sort of heart connection and appreciation for other people, who are all surely going through their own stuff, too.

We can apply this to our intimate relationships as well. It’s so easy sometimes to let our own suffering and challenges make us more self-involved, and to let this negatively creep into our interactions with others, including our partner. But it doesn’t need to be that way. We can let the pain remind us that everyone experiences pain, and that what makes the pain more bearable is to bear it with others.

If you find yourself in a moment, in your relationship or in your life more broadly, where there is an overwhelming level of bitter, remember to also notice the sweet quietly standing to the side.