Particularizing Sadness

Trigger Emotion, Don't Dictate

What Makes You Sad?

The next time you’re sad, try this. Sit down with a pen and take notes about the situation. Jot down your exact circumstances; don’t analyze and try to resolve it, simply document the details.

Case in point, for twenty years I’d walk into Imperial Dry Cleaners in Camas, Washington and see the same unclaimed wedding dress hanging there. Picture it, looming up high, near the ceiling, hanging on that conveyor robotic chain that sails the plastic-wrapped clothes around the space. The clerk clicks a button, and all the shirts and uniforms and gowns coming floating around. With every visit that wedding gown would float past me, its long, pleated skirt of shimmering white satin, its bodice beaded with seed pearls, its padded shoulders and long, fitted sleeves.

Every week I saw that dress, I’d be reminded that someone had loved it and left it here to be cleaned and never returned to claim it. Per Minimalism, here was such an Object loaded with meaning. Had the bride died? Gotten divorced? The dress had been abandoned in a Lady Diana era of Big Shoulders, long before I first saw it. Each week, it sailed by like Miss Havisham’s ghost. The sight of it generated sadness and fear in me. But why?

The same goes for chihuahuas. For a year a veterinarian in the Bay Area wrote to me. He had a dozen chihuahuas in various stages of old age because pet owners would drop them at the clinic, then call to hear the prognosis and cost of treating them, then never return to collect the animal.

Perhaps the dress owner never had the money to pay her cleaning bill…

Here’s Why the Dress Made Me Sad

For years I would drop a sweater or two at a cleaner, then have to wait a few months before I had enough money to bail them out. It felt like pawning an heirloom. For two decades that left-behind wedding dress subliminally reminded me of bad times.

When you particularize the circumstances you can generate emotion in the reader — without the reader feeling manipulated or bullied. But first you need to become aware of the specific circumstances that produce those emotions in yourself.

The bonus is that as you examine those circumstances you tend to put the emotion outside of yourself. And the emotion diminishes and vanishes.

And, no, I’m not getting a kick-back from the dry cleaners. Last week they finally tossed the dress out. Not the best way to resolve an object, but it had served its long, spooky purpose. Yes, like the bridesmaid dress Marla Singer wore.

What Inexplicably Bums You Out?