Before Elon Musk, when Twitter was still Twitter and not “the website formerly known as,” Brandon Stosuy tweeted about seeing someone crying in public. It hit a nerve. People related, replied with their own sightings, or asked if it had been them (in a telling turn about America’s sadness, no one who asked was ever the actual person he saw.) Then Stosuy started adding mentions to Bon Iver’s song “Holocene” to soundtrack these scenes, and a hashtag signifying sadness was born (#Holocene).
“I would always joke about how if you play that song, anything that you came across would be sad. You could just see the most commonplace thing and suddenly, it's depressing,” Stosuy shares. “I remember one was: ‘guy doing push ups the night before his high school reunion #Holocene,’ and it’s just these moments that seem pathetic or sad, or whatever. And then people thought it was funny.”
So funny, in fact, that The New York Times’ Popcast called him “The leading proprietor of Twitter-based Bon Iver sentiment humor.” And thus began the founder of The Creative Independent website’s latest book, Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears.
“I reached out to my friend, Rose Lazar, who I'd known when I was living in Buffalo, which is another very prime territory for crying, and I said to her: ‘Hey, would you want to illustrate a couple of these tweets?’”
Stosuy adds, “And then from there, we just kept expanding and it kept growing. And then my friend, Matt, who's in the band The National, he was like, ‘Oh, this is a really interesting project. Could I contribute something to it?’ And that was the first moment where I was like, ‘Maybe it shouldn't just be tweets. And it shouldn't just be one person.’”
The result is a book about sadness featuring 115 contributors sourced through friends and family and that website again, Twitter. Stosuy opened up his DMs and asked for contributions from people who came in contact with crying through their jobs.
“A zookeeper wrote me and school teachers and someone who worked at a crematorium. So suddenly, all these strangers were reaching out. And I was sorting through hundreds of replies and finding the ones that made the most sense.”
“The only prompt I gave people was: ‘Tell me a story of a time you cried,’ it was really open. And then people would respond to that in very different ways,” Brandon Stosuy says of his book “Sadness Happens: A Celebration of Tears.” Photo by Jane Lea.
Many of the book’s essays came from Angelenos, below are two:
Sasha Grey
(actor, writer, musician, content creator)
We are born crying, the fluid from our mother’s womb expelled from our lungs as we take our first breath. It’s how we communicate before we can speak. When we get older, crying can make us feel incredibly helpless, like a young child. My last good cry was recent; I was slightly curled on the couch, all of my limbs squeezing in toward my chest. This should paint a picture for you that these were sad tears; it’s rare to experience sad tears while in a perfect posture. I waited until the end of the day so I wouldn’t lose myself and become unproductive. It was the anniversary of my father’s death, and I’ve approached my grief this way over the past few years. Because I know exactly how I will feel that day, I can actively control my tears. It’s a relief. The sneakier bouts of emotions that arise usually come with the change of the seasons, in the days leading up to this anniversary. This is when I can’t control the tears, and these emotions can be overwhelming. I’ll smell a sweet flower or a hint of a cigarette, and it reminds me of spending the summer with my dad.
As I laid there, I realized that crying is the one response to our emotions that mirror what it was like in the womb. We often close our bodies inward, like fetuses, enveloped by tears and runny noses. In these moments we may even lose ourselves in an unconscious attempt to release ourselves from anguish. We are at our most vulnerable. I found myself feeling exactly as I did when I was a kid, desiring to be held or comforted by my parents. I remembered that one day my mom will depart this earth and the sinking feeling became deeper. Then a flash of my dad crying happy tears entered my mind, the faint echo of his wheezing uncontrollable laughter rang in my ear, and everything seemed alright.
Maral
(producer, DJ, label A&R, helper of growing a healthy music ecosystem)
On June 9, 2022, the musician Julee Cruise passed away from suicide at the age of sixty-five. Sheh suffered from horrible health issues and in the words of her husband, “She left this realm on her own terms. No regrets. She is at peace.”
I had spent many years crying to her music, sometimes because of sorrow in my own life, but most of the time from the sheer beauty and pureness of her music. I spent the whole day in tears when I learned of her death, thinking about her journey, her legacy, and the impact it’s had on me and so many others. I cried thinking about how our health has an impact on our ability to enjoy the world –– and continue adding value to it. This coincided with feelings of sadness and dread I have in relation to my own physical health and how its limitations are a constant source of frustration and tears. But Julee’s story showed me tat even within those limitations you can have a profound impact and create a legacy, that there is beauty in between the tears.
I have those moments of reflection and tears often with music, especially from the music of women who have struggled and who had their time cut short. (Like, for instance, the legendary Iranian singer Hayedeh, who represents so much to the Iranian people. Every time I listen to her songs, I –– and, I think, every Iranian –– shed a communal tear.)
There is a longing in these women’s music, for something beyond their reach and beyond the reach of almost every woman in the music industry. They’ve had to withstand so much just to get the chance to share their art with the world. I cry thinking about their struggles. I also shed tears of joy that we have the gift of their music.
Most of my tears nowadays stem from my frustrations with the music industry and the slow disintegration of any sort of support system for artists outside of the mainstream. This is a constant topic in my therapy sessions. This feeling of helplessness luckily diminishes whenever I’m in community spaces and supportive underground zones. The exchange of appreciation and support within a community helps you feel like even though you might be hindered in some ways due to isolating health issues, that what you are doing is impactful and is helping to fertilize the ecosystem. Good music can be transcendent. It helps reset me. That’s the thing: in between the tears, I’m still a member of the music ecosystem.
Copyright 2023 by Brandon Stosuy and Rose Lazar. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.