I’ve tried to write (what feels like) 15,000 versions of this essay. All of them ultimately cratered by the fact that it’s hard to write jocularly about deep emotional topics or emotionally about practical things. But I still (perhaps quixotically) think the below text should be useful to at least some sad people, so I’m posting this incomplete and imperfect version until I get time (probably never) to write the best version of this.

First off, I’ve been sad before, extremely sad, in probably a million different ways, and it’s embarrassing to admit that. So if you’re reading this and your reaction is ‘oh, well, that’s great but you don’t know how sad I’m really feeling right now, so this probably doesn’t apply to me’, well, here’s a list: 

1. In college sophomore year, I used to go home to my dorm room and cry at night, every day, for a full year. Sometimes just to mix it up I’d lie catatonic on the upstairs attic coach staring at the ceiling, kind of vaguely hoping not to exist the next day. The weird thing is before that I was a totally joyous kid and I was in my dream place (MIT,  woohoo!) so I was also terribly confused as to why I was suddenly very unhappy, and felt like I really didn’t deserve to be sad about anything. In retrospect, I think this was actually what people call depression, but I was 15 and didn’t really have anyone to talk to so for a year (or more) it just felt like the world was ending, slowly and quietly. 

2. Since moving to silicon valley, there have been years where I felt paralyzed by feelings of worthlessness, self-doubt, and as though I really didn’t deserve to be here or belong. As one example, I’ve had an enormously hard time at parties because I personally usually feel like a kind of dour lump incapable of doing anything other than talking about science. And when I turned 25 last year, I had an acute moment of crisis where I was absolutely convinced I had done nothing of value in the world and didn’t deserve to go on existing. 

Objectively, these are pretty nonsensical thoughts and feelings in general. For example, telling myself I had done nothing of value when I was 25 was just wrong. It’s hard for any human to make it to 25 without doing at least one objectively valuable thing, no matter how small that thing might be. Even if I hadn’t every done anything professionally, I’ve made valuable memories with friends and family and written small but well thought-through things. People have paid me for the work I’ve done in the past, so that must have had some objective value. But this voice, this catastrophizing extreme voice, just yells nonsensical things in an extreme and unforgiving way. A typical dialogue might sound something like the below: 

Voice: Hey there, how are you doing? Feeling pretty good about yourself huh? Well, have you solved aging yet? 

Me: Uhhh….no

Voice: Haha! You deserve to die! Like everyone else will! You are a terrible person! Go burn in your own version of moral hell. Useless 25 year old, haha! 

This has made it enormously hard to ever take compliments for any work I do professionally, because this exact monologue plays in my head every time I hear something nice.

So, why am I writing this? Because I don’t think those kinds of feelings are actually helpful, and I think there is a quick way to feel a lot less of them.

Here are (my quick, poorly written) steps to feeling not sad when you’re feeling miserable: 

1. Find a way to believe that you *should* be feeling better, and want to 

When I was a teenager and feeling extremely sad, it ended on a roadtrip with my Dad. At some point, I broke down in front of him crying and confessing all, and he looked me straight in the eyes and said ‘Sweetie, listen to me right now. This is probably one of the most important things you’ll ever hear. You don’t have to be sad. Listen to me listen to me. You. Don’t Have. To. Be. Sad. You have a voice in your head that is telling you things that aren’t right. Don’t let it do that. And these feelings will stop’

Of course, I didn’t believe him, not fully, right then. Obviously, he was happy. How could a happy person possibly understand sad, sorrowful me? But he gave me a book, Feeling Good by Dan Burns. Reading it helped me enormously. 

2. Notice when you are yelling at yourself, how incorrect some of those thoughts are

After I read the book, I started noticing that a lot of the things I’d mentally cycle through on a daily basis were just flat wrong. I started to feel puzzled - were these thoughts actually helpful? I had kind of assumed that beating yourself up internally was useful, like whipping a horse to get it to move faster (which, when I really thought about the analogy, didn’t seem like a nice thing to do either). But could I have been wrong about that? 

3. Find a way to correct catastrophic/incorrect thoughts every single time they come up

Lastly - and this will take time, and practice and is hard, and I'm not sure how to write this part in a compelling enough way that you will believe me - you have to find a way to correct whatever voice internally is telling you incorrect things. But you can’t just do it for a few thoughts - I think there’s something really important about doing it every single time you start to rant at yourself, so your baseline mental hygiene gets in a really good place. You can even go full self-help and write an explicit table to correct yourself every time you hear something wrong in your head. Here’s an example I ran through for this piece: 

I’m not saying I really believed the thoughts in the left column as I was writing this, but they’re the kind of thoughts that used pop up automatically all of the time and would need to be dealt with. 

If this doesn’t work for you immediately, don’t panic. I keep forgetting how to do this effectively every 4 years are so, and then falling back into a funk. I might also be completely wrong - who knows! It probably took about a year to fully recover from being sad as a teenager. But I can honestly say that this has been personally really helpful, and if I had a kid and they were sad I’d really want them to know that it probably wasn’t as hopeless as they were feeling. So I wrote this in the hopes that if there’s a 15 year old feeling the way I was a decade ago, or sometimes do a daily basis, that this might help them a bit.