Sadness has tailed me relentlessly since I left Vancouver.

I have done a valiant job of evading it. I have kept busy exploring beautiful places, meeting amazing people, and finding a new sense of calm. But when I least expect it, there it is.

Welling up behind my eyes. Tightening the back of my throat.

It comes at the most inopportune times (as it always has for me) like when I’m sitting at a sunlit café eating gelato or about to enjoy dinner in a beautiful restaurant.

This sadness that hovers in the wings, like a closet monster, threatens to derail me. I’ve been afraid to feel it for a while. So, I have pushed it away. Used traveling as a wonderful excuse to box it up. I’ve always been good at that. Packaging up my emotions and telling myself that I’ll feel them later, when it’s more convenient.

I learned early on to just keep moving. I never felt entitled to wallow in sadness. Sadness was for sissies. Losers.

But the horrors of the past year are catching up with me and as I sit here in this beautiful restaurant in this magical city, I feel profoundly sad.

Sad for the girl that I used to be; the girl who was blindsided by cancer; the girl who had to endure a nightmare year. How did I get through it? Through the fear, pain, and sickness? I have downplayed it to you and to myself, but it was awful.

Just as I’m about to ruin my perfectly delicious risotto with a waterfall of tears, I think of someone very special to me who gave me the book, ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ written by Rainer Rilke. Soon after we met, he read to me in his beautiful accent from letter number eight. A certain paragraph comes to mind and I pull out my copy and flip to the letter dated August 12, 1904.

‘But please consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through to the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being undergone a change while you were sad…Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grown mute in shy perplexity, everything within us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.’

As I continue to read, the urge to cry in my dinner mercifully passes. I put down the book and feel a little lighter. But, instead of immediately pasting on my stiff upper lip and pretending to be fine, I’m going to curl up with this emotion for a while. Maybe go back to my little hotel room and let the tears come. See what the sadness has to teach me, and then just feel it until it dissipates. Hopefully once it has diminished, I can get back to joy…