Reflections on Sadness, Healing, and Shared Humanity
Some stories take time to be shared - last February, I attended a deeply moving performance by my friend Gina-Alina Pațilea, a theatre maker whose work often balances between raw vulnerability and brave honesty. Her performance, Confronting Depression, touched me in ways that were both deeply personal and universally human.
In that performance, Gina invited us into her intimate world - a space where pain, resilience, and transformation coexist. Through her words and presence, she explored what it means to live through depression, to sit with it, and to confront it not as an abstract concept, but as a lived reality. Watching her on stage was like witnessing someone hold a mirror to the unspoken parts of our collective experience - the quiet sadness, the fatigue, the grief, and the deep longing to feel whole again.
What struck me most was her courage to be transparent. In a world that so often celebrates strength, productivity, and relentless optimism, Gina’s performance was a reminder that sadness and grief are not weaknesses - they are part of being human. Her artistic vulnerability created a safe space where suppressed emotions could breathe. It also reminded me of my own belief that sadness, grief, and even despair are natural states - messengers that ask for our attention, not enemies to be eliminated.
But there is a delicate threshold: when sadness ceases to be a passing wave and becomes a permanent landscape, something shifts. The darkness can begin to define the days, and the body forgets what light feels like. In that sense, Gina’s Confronting Depression was not only an artistic exploration but also a social commentary on how fragile the balance can be between feeling deeply and drowning silently.
Word Up event “Moving Words”. Photography by Omar Henry Breeveld
At Word Up’s “Moving Words” event in December last year, Gina shared a fraction of that performance - a glimpse that already carried the emotional depth of her full-length work presented in Leiden this February. It stayed with me for months. Her openness gave language to something so many of us carry privately.
I found myself reflecting on the broader global conversation about mental health. Despite rising awareness, mental health struggles are still often met with misunderstanding or discomfort. Around the world, depression rates continue to climb, exacerbated by isolation, economic pressures, social comparison, and the lingering effects of global crises. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression is now one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, affecting more than 280 million people. And yet, in many communities, seeking help is still stigmatised or financially inaccessible.
This dissonance - between awareness and action, empathy and systems - reveals a deeper truth about our societies: we are collectively unwell, yearning for connection, rest, and authenticity.
What Gina’s performance illuminated for me is that art has a unique capacity to heal and humanise. It does not fix pain, but it witnesses it. And sometimes, being witnessed is the first step toward healing. When someone dares to speak their truth out loud, others are freed to do the same. In that way, her Confronting Depression became not only a personal act of recovery but also a communal ritual of recognition.
As I reflect on my own relationship with sadness, I realise that healing often begins when we stop running from our emotions and allow them to exist. The more we hide grief, the louder it knocks. The more we suppress pain, the more it seeps into the corners of our lives. Learning to live alongside these feelings - without letting them define us - might be one of the most radical acts of self-compassion we can practice.
In the end, I left Gina’s performance with a sense of quiet reverence. For her courage. For the honesty that art can hold. For the shared understanding that mental health is not a linear journey but a collective responsibility, because confronting depression is not only an act of survival. It’s an act of love - for oneself, and for humanity.