melancholia

There’s a kind of sadness that wraps itself around you like a velvet fog—soft, lingering, impossible to shake. I’d been moving through that fog quietly, unsure of whether I was feeling too much or not enough.

Then I heard Selena Gomez’s revival of “El Muchacho de los Ojos Tristes.” I’d never heard the original, but this song carried something eerily familiar. It didn’t just play—it echoed. It held me. It stirred something quiet and buried, a sorrow I didn’t realize was still awake inside me.

I’ve felt this before—through music that presses its hand to your chest like it’s trying to resuscitate something. This one did exactly that. It brought up unlived emotions—sentimientos compartidos—grief I didn’t know was mine but somehow felt like it belonged to me. The kind of sorrow that doesn’t ask permission—it just rises.

Since I started listening to it, melancholia has settled over me. Not just sadness—but something deeper. That slow ache that lives in your chest like a ghost of something you never had but still mourn.

I spoke to a friend about it. She said I was experiencing depression. I told her it felt like something else—something heavier, more haunting. I called it melancholia. She brushed it off, said it was all the same. But I disagreed.

Depression is absence. Numbness.

Melancholia is presence. Longing.

It’s grief laced with beauty. Pain that almost feels sacred. It’s nostalgia for a moment in time that doesn’t exist. A hunger for something you can’t name, only feel.

This song didn’t fix me. But it did something else.

It reminded me—I still have a pulse.

I’m still here. Still aching. Still hoping for something. A glance. A connection. A sign that I haven’t disappeared under the surface of my own silence.

I said this to someone:

“I feel like I am the girl with the sad eyes. Diving deeper and deeper into a melancholic state, wanting so badly to find a spark. I want my heart to be shocked back to life.”

And they told me:

“You’re not lost. You’re becoming.”

So this is me—becoming.

Still tender. Still searching. But no longer asleep.

There’s a spark out there. I don’t know what it looks like yet. But I know I want to feel it.

I used to not understand my cousin when she’d listen to sad songs while feeling low. I thought it was like pouring water on a drowning heart. But now I understand. Sometimes the saddest songs are the only ones that know how to hold us.

So if you're reading this and you feel it too, know this: You are not alone. There is no shame in aching. No weakness in longing. Feeling deeply means your heart is still beating.

Let it ache if it must. Let it rise. And when you're ready, follow the faintest flicker of hope. Even if it's just a breath. Even if it's just a song.

You're not lost.

You're becoming.

And somewhere ahead of you—maybe just beyond this fog—there’s a spark.

And this time, it’s for you.

💓💓💓

If this resonated with you, like, share and comment. We weren’t meant to feel this alone.

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met my doctor/counselor yesterday…I have been suffering with prolonged depression and grief…well more than a decade. My counselor acknowledged life has been very severe on me. Repeated losses, failures, shame which has left me scarred and scared making me severely anxious. It may often appear, for a man who is 56, that my angst and lament, vulnerability and anxiety are more of a mis-besotted teen, very juvenile. Maybe that’s my senility. I have prolonged depressive disorder… My doc feels there was perhaps a melancholic disposition inherent in me even earlier as a kid…continuous setbacks, personal & professional has permanently impaired me…😢 the worse is my loneliness…no one sees my grief and the abjectness of my condition…dismissing it, ridiculing it, comparing and invalidating it…This becomes more humiliating. For now there’s one friend who supports & understands…doesn’t judge me…stays with me when possible… hears me out… rest are all very instrumentally helpful at best if not totally indifferent. With no spouse, kids or siblings, my isolation is total. My career too was continuously bewitched that further debilitated my esteem and dignity. Repeated setbacks aggravated my despair and i just had to give up work too. People familiar with my history which I have shared many times over the years here may also be tired reading all over again. Yet I hope few will still remain empathetic and reach out.

Many feel that because I look for meaning in everything I do, I have ended up so. Few look for meaning - work, family and even socialisation is all out there and people carry it out their roles as a machine meant to carry out its functions. This may look very existential reasoning but existentialism I imagine is not something that emerges in such mundanity and routines but through deep thoughts. However to transcend mind and meanings in certain agency and subjectivity is beyond an ordinary me. Guess most today are socialised into indifference by default. Being and remaining an automaton serves the larger system too which thrives in its meaninglessness and folks are primed to merely play out their roles.

Friends who still may care are perhaps helpless…but to me their helplessness appears like indifference and cold diffidence. My doc recognises how i still do my best to keep myself functional…but just not enough to keep myself sane for long…medicines help but they can only go so far . Some worthies aver that the only control I have is in my ability to respond to crisis…not the repeated and crushing episodes, failures, loss 😞. That life is not fair is so brutally exemplified in my life story. The misery, the damnation, the horror of loss, grief and loneliness. This strangely I feel I cannot get over and it’s not even meant to be gotten over. A life of despair, melancholia, grief is a permanent part of me but which in many ways also helps me to understand the world, existence differently and expose many of the shibboleths that people carry both aware and unaware. Yet the extreme sense of failure overwhelms and death as relieving from misery is a possibility that reigns my mind always. 😞🙏🏽 #Grief #melancholia #prolongedepressive #Anxiety #Loneliness #acuteisolation #Depression #Shame #failure #SuicidalThoughts