What Writing Sad Stories Feels Like and What Happy Thoughts Can Do

Photo by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash

By: Shanisha Branch

Writing sad stories feels like a cozy sweater: you who find home in lonely corners or upended bottles of brown stank know the feeling. Those who aren’t strangers to trauma know the difference between saying what’s hard versus saying what’s necessary on a page. It feels like spilling your deepest fears or locked up emotions in a journal except this is the one you’re afraid to read. 

Writing sad stories is easy because it may be the only way you know how to write. You write what’s true: the anger found in your trauma, the reticent hurt you feel, how Black people seem to have a collective experience in this – because writing a lie would feel less than. And then you’re reminded of all the voices of your professors in nonfiction workshop classes: nonfiction writers have an obligation to tell the truth; the ugly parts are necessary; readers can spot a liar. So, you make an effort, to tell the truth, no matter how it hurts. Except yours seem sad and anxious all the time. You know this sweater well; its fabric is familiar and its backstitch serves as blueprint for your writing.

Considering happy thoughts about the simplicity of love, the complexity of childbirth, or the meaning of life is folly. Your life, as you know it, is happy and fun and exciting but also raw and dirty and nasty. Since you were fifteen, you’ve known life to be hateful in handling your chronic disease, fumbling through it with an absentee father, and embodying the trope of angry Black woman. But you will try your hand at happy thoughts although you aren’t as jovial as others think. They assume you to be a giver of benefits to doubts and an avid searcher of sides that are bright. But you are not a desperate optimist, you are a realist and want to write about stuff that’s real. Like when the beat drops on your favorite Beyoncé song; the way the ends of your knotty hair curl up when wet; how your grandmother kisses you on both cheeks whenever she sees you; when your friends hype you up when you wear your fave black dress; the satisfaction you feel when you do your edges just right; being silent; payday; prayer; Chipotle. 

You realize happy thoughts were there all along, mingled in between the stank of brown liquor, the space between lonely and corners, threaded between the smoothness of all the cozy sweaters and the roughness of imprints that don’t submit to seams. Those thoughts allow you to write what’s easy. And so, next time, you’ll try writing what’s not. 

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Shanisha Branch is a third-year MFA candidate at Old Dominion University. She currently lives and works in Portsmouth, VA where she teaches high school English. When she’s not teaching tenth graders on how to properly use sarcasm, she is watching hours of YouTube or singing karaoke. She enjoys laughing loudly, well, because we all need to laugh more. You can find her on all social media @honestlyshanisha