I used to hate feeling sad. It meant something was really wrong with me. But I never quite knew what. So I turned it into other things, like anger, or too much T.V., or drinking binges, or isolation.

There's two words I came to hate hearing. "Cheer up!" Easy for you to say! Even wellmeaning and persistent friends saying, "What's wrong?" really annoy me. Like I know what's wrong!

That's the problem. I usually don't. Sadness is a symptom a slow nudge a gentle tap on the shoulder that says, "Look at your heart. Something's hurting."

So instead of ignoring sadness or changing it or deadening it with various painkillers like booze or sex, I've learned to just go with it. Wherever it takes me. However long it needs to. Whatever the outcome.

I've made sadness one of my dearest and trusted friends. Trusted, because he is always leading me to the hurt and the healing. Dearest, because he lets me know my own heart is real and can still feel.

For those of us who were molested, seduced and abused, sadness lets us feel our loss of innocence, of "normal", of sexual awakening, of family, of life.

It's the sadness of a little boy or a young teen who trusted an older friend or adult or father, or uncle, priest, teacher and for that trust was rewarded with sick touch, and fondling, and pornography, and betrayal.

It is the sadness of one who needed affection, and protection, and to be held, and to be led, and to be sheltered and to be wanted and liked and, got some of that along with the price tag of allowing an adult to use our body for their own pleasure, or forced to do something sexual to an adult and so carry the guilt of it. "Well, you did it to me too, didn't you?"

It is the sadness of a kid who enters adolescence with a ton of guilt and fear, feeling responsible for being raped, feeling confused because he may still love the abuser, feeling afraid that the acts committed mean they are "queer".

And the worst sadness that he is still lonely, and needs to be held, and needs to be protected, and loved, and liked but no one can be trusted anymore.

I'm thankful for sadness because he makes me know what I've lost so I can cry and grieve and let it go.

Almost anything can bring on sadness, but some things especially a movie where a fatherfigure defends or rescues a child or befriends a lonely teen boy seeing warm loving fathers and mothers kissing and holding and playing with their little children fathers playing baseball with their sons summer mornings all lonely and quiet and the sound of children playing without me somewhere...

And I embrace the sadness. I drink it in, and I weep, and I grieve for the child I was who had no touch or kiss, who had no friends, who lay paralyzed while others violated his trusting soul and stole his heart and locked him in jagged chains. I weep. And I sigh as healing tears dry and I get back part of my tortured, innocent heart.

Please don't tell us to "cheer up" or ask why we don't just smile, as if that was a magical solution to wipe away years of anguish and lonely loss and don't ask why we don't have the "Joy of the Lord". I NEED my sadness. The door to joy is found in embracing my sorrow and loss.