“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” ~Viktor Frankl
A few weeks ago, I moved to a new city for a new job, leaving behind a quiet hill town where I had built five years of friendships, routines, and a version of myself I understood well. I told everyone, including myself, that I was excited. Mostly, I was. But underneath the excitement was a grief I hadn’t fully named yet.
I didn’t notice it arriving. I only noticed what it left behind.
It was an ordinary afternoon when I first caught it. The heat outside was thick and relentless, the kind that makes even walking feel like an argument with your own body. I had to cross campus to the canteen just to pack a simple lunch, and by the time I got there, I was fuming. Not mildly annoyed. Fuming.
Then I remembered something else from that same week: I had spent hours preparing a new course. I’d chosen every reading with care and planned each session like it mattered, because it did to me. When the enrollment list came out, not a single student had opted for it. I told myself it was fine. I told myself these things happen. But something in me had quietly deflated, and I hadn’t stopped to sit with it.
That afternoon, in the heat, on my way to pack a sandwich, I felt like everything was going wrong. The sun felt personal. The walk felt endless. When a colleague stopped to make small talk, I felt an irritation so out of proportion to the moment that it startled me.
Something small went wrong later that same day—I don’t even remember what, some minor inconvenience—and it felt enormous. Disproportionate. Like one more piece of evidence in a case I was quietly building against my own life.
For a moment, I genuinely believed the problem was the heat. The canteen. The empty course. The small inconvenience. Each one felt like its own separate, legitimate grievance.
Then I asked myself one honest question: Am I really angry at all of these things, or am I carrying a sadness that has started to color everything?
I sat with that question longer than I expected to. And the honest answer was uncomfortable: I was grieving a life I had chosen to leave, even though leaving had been the right decision.
I was disappointed that a class I cared about hadn’t found its students.
I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.
And instead of feeling any of that directly, I had let it leak sideways into everything around me, disguised as irritation at the heat, the walk, the small talk, the inconvenience.
This is something I think many of us do without realizing it. Sadness rarely announces itself directly. It’s quieter than that, and sneakier. It doesn’t say, “I am grieving.” It says, “This heat is unbearable.” It doesn’t say, “I feel disappointed and a little bit like a failure.” It says, “Nothing is going right today.” It borrows the voice of whatever is nearby and speaks through it instead.
I once heard an old story about a warrior who, right before an important battle, put down his weapon and admitted he couldn’t go on. He wasn’t shamed for it. He was allowed to grieve, allowed to feel confused, even allowed to sit in his uncertainty for a while. But he wasn’t encouraged to stay there indefinitely, either. He was gently guided back toward clarity, not by denying what he felt but by learning to see it clearly instead of letting it color everything else.
That distinction has stayed with me since I first heard it: there is a difference between feeling an emotion and living inside it. One is a visit. The other is a residence.
When sadness moves in and starts narrating your life instead of just passing through it, the traffic stops being traffic. It becomes proof that the universe is against you today. The heat stops being weather. It becomes one more thing you have to endure on top of everything else. A small disappointment stops being a single event and becomes evidence for a much larger, much bleaker story: that nothing in your life is going right.
The tricky part is that none of this feels like a story while it’s happening. It feels like the truth. It feels like an accurate report on how bad things are. That’s what makes it so easy to miss.
You don’t experience it as “I am sad and it is affecting my perception.” You experience it as “everything today is genuinely terrible,” and you go looking for reasons to confirm it. And you always find them, because there’s always a hot afternoon or an inconvenient errand or an unanswered message you can point to.
I don’t think the answer is to suppress the sadness or perform positivity over it. I tried that for about a day, and it didn’t work. Telling myself I was fine when I wasn’t just added a second layer of exhaustion on top of the first.
What helped instead was smaller and stranger. I started asking myself, in moments of disproportionate irritation, a very simple question: Is this really about what’s in front of me, or is something older speaking through it?
Sometimes the answer was genuinely just “I’m hot and tired,” and that was fine too. But sometimes the answer was “I miss my old life,” or “I’m disappointed in myself,” or “I feel like I’m starting over and I’m scared it won’t work out.” Naming it correctly took away its disguise. And things without disguises are much easier to hold.
I also started separating the sentence “This moment is difficult” from the sentence “My whole life is difficult.” They sound similar, but they are not the same claim. The first one is almost always true and usually temporary. The second one is rarely true and almost never provable, but sadness will happily hand it to you as if it were fact, and in a low moment, you’ll believe it.
Healing, I’m learning, isn’t the absence of pain, and it isn’t pretending the pain isn’t there. It’s closer to this: letting the feeling exist without letting it drive. You can let sadness sit in the passenger seat, even let it speak sometimes, without handing it the keys to interpret every single thing that happens to you that day.
Some days I still get it wrong. I still snap at something small and realize twenty minutes later that the small thing was never really the problem. But I catch it faster now. And catching it faster has made an enormous difference, not because the sadness disappears, but because it stops being allowed to write the whole story of my day.
If you’re in a season where everything feels irritating, heavier, and harder than it should be, it might be worth pausing and asking the same question I asked myself that afternoon: is this really about what’s in front of me, or is something quieter asking to be noticed?
You don’t have to fix it immediately. You don’t even have to feel better right away. You just have to notice who’s actually driving.
Because every new day deserves to be met with fresh eyes, not filtered through yesterday’s tears.
About Dr. Kalyani Abhyankar
Dr. Kalyani Abhyankar is an academic and writer with a long-standing interest in storytelling as a tool for personal and professional growth. She writes about navigating transitions, emotional resilience, and finding clarity in ordinary moments. You can find more of her reflections on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalyaniabhyankar/
Amazing, thank you. 🙏