Sadness is a curious thing.

The Cambridge dictionary defines it as “the feeling of being unhappy, especially because something bad has happened.”

But I don’t mean sadness that accompanies a problem or sadness as a result of a problem, but sadness that sometimes strikes you without any reason.

Of course, there is a reason. You just don’t know what it is or you deny what it is. Or it could be depression, but that’s a story for another day, except maybe I need to tell you that should your symptoms—i.e. irritability, poor or excessive appetite resulting in either dramatic weight loss or weight gain, a sense of foreboding or emptiness, mysterious aches and pains—last for more than two weeks, you should see a doctor.

There’s a thin line between solitude and loneliness or, if it’s there at all, it’s blurred, but spotting the difference is easy enough: Loneliness is isolation when you perceive a lack of companionship or meaning, when you feel unaccepted or troubled by the sense that something is missing. Solitude, on the other hand, is being with yourself, not alone technically, but drawing energy or entertainment or elucidation from deep within you, as you would from meaningful social interactions or relationships.

Even then, it’s easy to mistake solitude for loneliness. Even Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who championed solitude for its power to harness the creative spirit, might have been lonely. I mean both were orphaned by their fathers early, Nietzsche at five, Emerson at eight, and both soon succumbed to illnesses of the mind, the former to madness, the latter to a debilitating memory loss that gave him the final reason to withdraw from the world.

As a child, I understood what loneliness meant. I was intimate with it. In fact, I welcomed it and nurtured it. I was very shy. I was terrified of children my age. Either that or I was bored with them (I couldn’t wait to grow up), so I had very few friends and, yet, even in their company, I would consider myself a loner. I was more interested in books. I had more fun cooking up stories, imagining things, creating worlds. I always had these conversations going on in my head, although they would sometimes find their voice in my pens and pencils or crayons, in my spoons and forks, in sticks or playthings, anything I could turn into a character in my stories. I did a lot of weird stuff, too, like I’d push my desk to the edge of the stairs and I’d write on it deep into the night with the stairs behind me. It was quite nerve-racking. It felt like there was some ghostly creature creeping up on me, but I thought I wrote better when scared.

You might say it wasn’t loneliness, but solitude, except I think, in hindsight, I was isolating myself from the world or creating a world that was different from the one I was in. I loved reading because it took me to those otherworlds and I loved creating worlds of my own, plus I needed to fill those hours I spent alone.

Although I was careful not to be caught talking to myself, especially in the voices of my imagined characters, I didn’t think I was crazy. I grew up at a time when crazy was nothing less severe than a multiple personality disorder. As a child, to borrow from The Verve’s 1990s song “Bittersweet Symphony,” I was “a million other people from one day to the next.”

Nevertheless, I didn’t think I was crazy. Back then, crazy was Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Crazy was Lolita Rodriguez in Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang. Crazy was Sisa after she lost Basilio and Crispin in Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere.

But loneliness helped me get creative, all those hours I would spend alone writing by hand on a yellow pad, all those summer days I would spend in the company of phantom beings I willed to life, all those late nights I would spend lost in my very vivid daydreams, all the time I spent turning pillows into mountains, our dining table into the Ritz or the Waldorf Astoria, the bedroom floor into a river of fire.

And I was fine, I was very productive, I would write novellas, poems, plays and for no reason other than my own creative urges and maybe to address my boredom.

Except I wasn’t very happy or, looking back, I wouldn’t describe myself as a happy child. While, in principle, I would agree with Emerson when he said, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own,” I resolved as I approached my teens that I would come out of my shell, have many friends, have a lot of fun, and be alive. I decided, guided by an entire childhood reading novels meant for grownups, that I wanted to be of this world.

“In loneliness,” said Nietzsche, “the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd the many eat him. Now choose.” It was a good thing I didn’t know Nietzsche in high school or I would not have been successful in my resolve to be more outgoing. By the time I was a high school freshman, you would think I was born again, from solitary to social just like that. Oh, to my estimation, I remained socially awkward, I still am, but I made friends so easily, so effortlessly. I would walk into a classroom picking out the crowd with whom I imagined I belonged and, without me doing anything, they would gravitate toward me, inviting me to lunch, dragging me along to the club on Friday night, sitting beside me in the cafeteria, or offering to give me a ride home, and then, in no time at all, I was practically the one who decided where we, as sort of a clique, should go, who would ride with whom, and which new friend was welcome to join the club.

In an FB post I wrote some time ago, I claimed that boredom was a luxury I no longer could afford. For the past 30 years, I could say I had been generally happy. Even in the depths of my grief or pain or sorrow, which was only a natural reaction to certain things that would happen to anyone alive, such as a death in the family or some financial fix or professional frustration or a health concern, I could not quite say I had at any point been an unhappy person since my late 20s. In fact, with much bravado, I once declared that sadness was a kind of self-indulgence.

So now, as I am gripped by sadness I could not quite place, I worry that maybe sadness is my long-lost shadow, that it left me alone while, resolute in my decision to choose happiness, I walked on sunshine, and now it’s back and it’s worse because, now that we are no longer in intimate terms, it has become a stranger.

But I choose to look at this way: That maybe in those childhood years I spent in the creative well inside me or between the covers of books or daydreaming upon the moon and the stars and a sky full of possibilities, I had fueled up enough to take me this far.

I’ve been in the sun for 30 years and maybe I’m burning out. It’s time to seek some shade, perchance I can replenish myself before going out in the sun again.

[If you feel you could use some help, you may call these hopelines: 0918-873-4673 (Smart), 0917-558-4673 (Globe), and (02) 8804-4673 (PLDT).]