Martinez 1 Katerina Martinez Professor Lago Essay 1 Draft 1 16 September 2013 The Necessity of Sadness Sadness seems to always

be considered a negative side effect to horrible situations. Individuals take it for granted and throw it around as if it is a waste of emotion. They do not truly realize how important sorrow and grief is to ones life. It may not be the best feeling in the world at that exact moment, but sadness can influence feelings such as courage and determination in the long run. Also, it helps us realize what it is we need in our lives to rise from the feelings of heartache. Sadness may feel like an endless tunnel at times. However, the feeling of being in an endless tunnel will make us take advantage of the feelings of positivity that happiness can bring us. Although sadness can give us feelings of repression, it is a necessity to ones life due to the fact that it can make us stronger, influence us to identify what it is that makes us happy, and the grief will assist us to appreciate the complete state of happiness. Emotions such as disappointment and heartbreak can lead to sadness, but they are able to make us stronger people. Everyone handles difficult situations, such as death, breakups, failing grades, in their own way. However, the feelings that follow these challenging situations do not always put us in a rational state of mind. Some individuals tend to overreact and make the situation worst, but other people are able to turn their cheek and keep their head up high. Everyone handles sadness in their own way, but it is the way one handles it that creates a positive outcome.

Martinez 2 One way to handle a difficult situation that creates a positive outcome is learning from the situation that brought oneself sadness. For example, if he or she fails an exam, they should take the situation as a learning experience. One may feel sad at the moment, but that feeling should make them want to work harder in order to avoid the feeling of disappointment over a failing grade. We are more apt to make the best of a terrible situation than a merely annoying one (Senior, 426). Ones imagination can influence a person to get out of their horrible mood by looking more at the positive aspects than the negative aspects. For instance, if someone had a horrible day, he or she can do an activity they thoroughly enjoy instead of moping or pitying themselves because of the bad day that they had. The feeling of sadness has the power to make people feel stronger by them being able to rise from the bottom on their own. Overcoming a difficult situation that puts a person in complete sadness can make he or she stronger than they were, and in turn, they are able to realize what it is that makes them truly happy. Being in a state of sadness for a certain amount of time, gives people a chance to figure out what exactly makes them happy. After a traumatic situation, feeling sad or upset is normal. Depending on how horrendous the event was, it takes time to overcome it and he or she can lose oneself because they are so caught up in feeling upset. The time between feeling sad and overcoming the event is when one has the opportunity to get to know themselves again. This opportunity can help them reach a state of independence or even just push them to break away from all the sadness that they have been feeling. Getting to know oneself may include deciding what he or she wants in their life that can potentially make them happy.

Martinez 3 Figuring out what exactly makes individuals happy is based on what they want and dont want in their lives. Although it states in Jennifer Seniors essay, Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness, that no matter where [we] live, human beings are terrible predictors of what will make [us] happy (426), people make their own happiness and no one knows oneself better than the actual individual. At times, humans may be fickle about what it is that they want, but figuring out what one wants is a process one must go through in order to make a solid decision on their true happiness. In my experience, the heartbreak over a break up and all the sadness that came with it helped me get to know myself better. After being with the same guy for two and a half years and then having it all end, put me in a long state of complete hopelessness. It took a while to get to the good place I am in today, but the time between getting over the breakup and feeling sad made me realize that I wanted to be more independent. That time by myself helped me to become even more independent than I was by making me stay strong and experience everything on my own. In result, the Authentic Happiness Inventory test calculated that on a scale from one to five, five being the happiest a person can be, I am a 3.33. The Authentic Happiness Inventory test tested how happy one is compared to other individuals in their zip code, their gender, age group, occupation group, educational level, and all the other web users. This test shows how far I have come since my break up and it shows that sadness is crucial because it gives us a chance to get to know oneself after a sad situation. The final reason sadness is necessary to ones life is because it can help him or her appreciate true happiness. After being able to figure out what makes oneself happy,

Martinez 4 an individual is able to experience happiness on their own. Sadness is an obstacle that people must go through in order to realize how great it is to be happy with oneself and the life they have. It is not exactly the easiest obstacle to go through, but afterwards, people do not take for granted happiness. Happiness is not always easy to come by, and in order to get to it, sadness has to come into ones life sometimes. In Mark Kingwells, In Pursuit of Happiness, he states, We do not always confront happiness head on, as it were, but it is nonetheless implicit in our decisions and undertakings, the ordering principle or end of our human projects (413). Kingwell is trying to express the fact that happiness does not come to everyone automatically. However, whether humans are aware of it or not, the choices we make and what we decide in our lives is because we want to be happy. When everything is said and done, happiness is the main goal. There is no clear cut definition of true happiness because happiness is different for everyone. However, happiness is reached by going through sadness and one is happy they should appreciate every moment of it because they know it does not come automatically. All in all, sadness is a necessity to life because it has the power to make someone stronger, it helps individuals realize what exactly makes them truly happy, and people tend to appreciate happiness even more. When one goes through a horrible situation, he or she becomes stronger from all that pain and sadness that they feel. The pain can make them strive to be better than they are because they do not want to feel the sadness that they felt at that horrible situation. Also, after all the pain, they realize what they want in their lives to make them happy. They start to go after what they want on their own, and

Martinez 5 they slowly break away from all the sadness. When one is over all the sadness and heartache, they may be happy at where they are in their lives and soon appreciate every positive moment they have. An individual tends to feel more powerful after going through this obstacle. Happiness has no solid definition, but people need to feel sadness in order to completely acknowledge their true state of satisfaction.

Martinez 6 Works Cited International Positive Psychology Association. Authentic Happiness Inventory. IPPA, 2006. Web. 14 Sep. 2013. Kingwell, Mark. In Pursuit of Happiness. Essay. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 1998. 413. Print. Senior, Jennifer. Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness. Essay. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 9 July 2006. 426. Print.