"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

~John Keats

I use to think that sadness was a place, a place where I'd go when I was unhappy or upset, a little hole I would dwell in until someone came to pull me out. But I was wrong, sadness is not a place one goes to; it's an emotion that ones feels just as happiness is not a place we get to when we feel at times that our lives are complete, it too is nothing more than a feeling, one of several strong emotions. Without one we cannot have the other. We do not know happiness without sadness just as we would not know sadness without happiness. To me, sadness was something negative and I did not realize the true beauty behind it. Society often views sadness as being malignant or even unnatural. And now I begin asking myself, "Is this really the case?".
No. It's not. We wouldn't be human if we didn't feel, if we didn't have emotions and feel to the extremes on both sides of the spectrum. Throughout our lives we will all experience times where we are swallowed up by grief and feelings of despair only to be spit back out and face the cycle all over again.

Many times when we are unhappy, people feel as though something is wrong in their lives or that something is wrong with them personally (at least this is how I felt). But when you really think about it, this sadness does many things. It allows you to appreciate the pain of others, it makes the happy moments in life that much more joyous, and at times it even helps you to see deep down who you really are. Even though people are always trying to achieve that feeling of happiness, it it during times of pain, not pleasure that people begin to grow and develop into the individuals they really are. Looking at sadness in this aspect, does it not have a beauty of its own? The truth behind sadness is a delicate beauty, just waiting to be discovered.