It's important to allow oneself to feel sad sometimes

By Caitlin Ward

Walk Away
By Franz Ferdinand

Swap my innocence for pride, crush the end within my stride
Said “I’m strong now I know that I’m a leader”
I love the sound of you walking away, you walking away
Mascara bleeds a blackened tear, oh
And I am cold, yes I’m cold, but not as cold as you are
I love the sound of you walking away, you walking away
I love the sound of you walking away, walking away

Why don’t you walk away? Why don’t you walk away?
Why don’t you walk away? No buildings will fall down
Why don’t you walk away? No ’quake will split the ground
Why don’t you walk away? The sun won’t swallow the sky
Why don’t you walk away? Statues will not cry
Why don’t you walk away? Why don’t you walk away?
Why don’t you walk away?
Why don’t you walk away?

I cannot stand to see those eyes, as apologies may rise
I must be strong and stay an unbeliever
And love the sound of you walking away, you walking away
Mascara bleeds into my eye, oh
And I’m not cold, I am old, at least as old as you are

And as you walk away, oh, as you walk away
And as you walk away, my headstone crumbles down
As you walk away, the Hollywood winds will howl
As you walk away, the Kremlin’s falling
As you walk away, Radio 4 is static
As you walk away, oh, as you walk away
Oh, as you walk away, oh, as you walk away

The stab of stilettos
On a silent night
Stalin smiles and Hitler laughs

Churchill claps Mao Tse-Tung on the back

I’ve been thinking about perspective lately. Or rather, I’ve been thinking about having perspective.

In general, we’re told to have more perspective than we often do. Living in one of the richest and safest countries in the world, it’s easy to forget that other people and other places don’t have it so good. Even in our own wealthy cities, there is poverty and crime with which we rarely come in contact. And living what are often quite sheltered lives, personal tragedies that are not in fact so tragic can get overblown. So it’s good to have perspective: to realize that whatever this is, it’s a hell of a lot better than what’s happening to someone else.

Personally, though, perspective has been smacking me around a bit for a while. My family has just come up on the second anniversary of my mom’s hemorrhagic stroke, and frankly, the two ensuing years have been unnecessarily adept at giving us all this perspective of which I speak.

There were, I think, a statistically improbable number of deaths, accidents and severe illnesses in the family. On occasion it’s been hard to suppress the thought that life is secretly being written by a melodramatic author with no sense of proportion.

Not to make you all pity me or my family, because that’s not the point. When genuinely awful things happen, there comes a strange moment of clarity when you realize just how much worse it could have been. My mom could’ve easily died two years ago, but she didn’t. She could’ve had her aneurysm rupture in a country without social safety nets, but she had it in Saskatchewan, where the health region is present and attentive. She could’ve not had a stroke at all, but been born in Somalia instead.

Perspective is important. Perspective makes you grateful, and it keeps you sane.

The trouble with so much perspective, though, is that when something in your life goes wrong but falls short of unmitigated disaster, it’s hard to justify being upset about it. After all, your mother’s not dead and you don’t live in Somalia. Chin up. But then, those thoughts are often not comforting when your bedroom is constantly full of hunter spiders and you’re terrified of arachnids.

Curiously, Scottish band Franz Ferdinand captured this feeling on the song Walk Away, from their 2005 album You Could Have It So Much Better. Not the arachnid bit (I think that’s pretty much exclusive to me), but the push and pull of having proper perspective. The song is about trying to end a relationship with varying degrees of success, but it’s also about setting personal tragedies in their proper context. At the song’s beginning, the narrator works hard not to be bothered by what’s going on. He asks this woman to “walk away,” noting that the world will not end if she does: “No buildings will fall down . . . No ’quake will split the ground.” The song’s second half is a bit less sensible. In that part, he’s convinced that western society will crumple if she walks away.

There are multiple interpretations to put on the song; it could be that in the first half, the narrator is trying to save his pride, and in the second part he lets the veil of his own vanity fall to reveal just how broken he is.

Alternatively, it could be that in the first half, she hasn’t walked away yet and he doesn’t realize just how heart-rending it all is until she does.

Whatever the narrator’s motivations, for the listener it’s a useful study in balancing one’s feelings. It’s important to view life in context. In reality, very few things are the end of world: massive meteors, super volcanoes, nuclear war and, you know. The Rapture. So this one relationship this one person is upset about doesn’t figure into the grand scheme of things so much. But while the break-up of a relationship isn’t actually the end of the world, sometimes it may feel as if it is. And after two years of trying not to be upset about anything but the unmitigated disasters, I think I’m working out how important it is to allow oneself to be sad, even over things like spiders in the basement. Just because something is not the most upsetting thing that could’ve possibly happened does not mean it’s not upsetting at all.

Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings