Culture Diary: So Sad Today

I don’t know how I discovered the Sosadtoday Twitter feed. I just know that the pithy one-liners they tweeted seemed to express something in me. Recent tweets include: “i don’t know how to live in the world,” “in a committed relationship with my obsessive thinking,” and “i’m just not that into me.”

Of course, these sentiments aren’t that different from Twitter’s general ethos (at least before the political grandstanding of 2020) of despair and tongue-in-cheek self-loathing. But the Sosadtoday feed seemed to provide a nice, succinct shorthand of a larger expression of sadness. It also gave permission to be sad…at least on Twitter.

The writer behind the tweets is a poet named Melissa Broder. Given that So Sad Today currently has more than 997,000 Twitter followers, it’s no surprise that Broder parlayed the idea into a book. But instead of taking the easy route and publishing a collection of tweets, Broder wrote a collection of personal essays — personal being a key term.

In the years since So Sad Today was published, in 2016, Broder has written two novels, 2018’s The Pisces and the soon-to-be-released Milk Fed. She’s also released five books of poetry. For someone so steeped in existential dread, she’s certainly productive.

Anyway, given my proclivity for sadness and personal essays and pithy tweets, I’d been looking forward to reading Broder’s essays. I’d picked up the collection at HousingWorks last year but haven’t gotten around to reading it until this week. And what a week to have chosen!

For some reason, I’d always kind of thought Broder’s So Sad persona was just that—a carefully crafted Twitter personality designed to maximize followers. To that end, I thought the tweets were clever and tongue-in-cheek. Like, oh look how sad we all are. Isn’t life a drag? I was sort of expecting the essays to be along those lines — sad, yes, but also kind of funny.

I was wrong. Very wrong. I wish I had known that before deciding to read it during election week, one of the most stressful times in recent American history.

I tend to read before bed, and sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll read for an hour or two in the middle of the night. Shockingly, I haven’t been sleeping well this week, and So Sad Today does NOT make for good…