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Writer's pictureAlex H

the story of 'sad out loud'

Sad Out Loud as a title came from a few different places. It was just a lot of little things over time just kind of quietly whispered to me that this was right, that it fit. It spoke so deeply of how I wanted to move forward with my recovery, and how I wanted to reach people. 



The phrase 'sad out loud' is actually something I tweeted in a little rant thread. I implored anyone reading it to reach out more to their friends, and in doing so give them the space to be "sad out loud" and help break the stigma around mental illness. From that, I got the idea to write a graphic memoir with that as the title, all about my life, my childhood, and my recovery. That idea eventually changed, largely because I didn't know how to write a book about something that was ongoing and have it ever feel truly done. So, I came up with the idea to start a website with a blog. I could write and post my work about my life and healing as it happened instead of struggling to put it together in a polished way when my life is far from polished and presentable. 


There are other little things that reinforced the title of Sad Out Loud for me. For one thing, my dad used to say I was SOL a lot - that is, shit outta luck. This was his genius way of mitigating my disappointment or frustration when things didn't go my way. When I was first putting ideas for this project together, I wrote about it in my sketchbook under the title Project SOL and the idea of turning something shitty my dad used to say to me into a positive force for myself as well as other people like me was empowering as hell. Additionally, my sister has told me many, many times that I am the sun, and sol means sun in Latin.

 

Now bouncing off that, I read somewhere once that sunflowers face the sun, and when there is no sun, they face each other. I don't know if that's true or not, but I feel like that's a perfect analogy for people needing other people during dark times as well as light ones. This is also the reason for the colour scheme of my website and social media stuff and the prevalence of sunflowers in my graphics. Sunflowers also happen to be my favourite flower.


While it was initially something that just slipped out when I was frustrated with the state of the conversation about mental health, all these little threads solidified it as a phrase I've begun to build my approach to healing around. 

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