Sometimes a dark room, a pint of ice cream and a good cry really are the best medicine after a terrible day.

But how often do we really allow ourselves that kind of catharsis?

The pressures of everyday life make it difficult to lean into our sadness and process grief or anxiety. But there are lessons to be learned from truly embracing big emotions.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

Susan Kane is an author and an introvert who became a motivational

speaker after coming out of her shell. Her book is called Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing

Make Us Whole. And in it, she explains why striving to be happy all the time robs us of deeper

emotional experiences. And she helps us notice all the places where joy and sorrow

naturally intersect in music, in spirituality, and in loss. Susan joined us in 2022. Susan, welcome to

think. Chris, thank you so much for having me. So how do you define this way of being that you call

bittersweetness? What sorts of things does a person with a kind of bittersweet, melancholic orientation to the world pay attention to that others might overlook?

We created a quiz.

I say we.

I collaborated with two of our greatest psychologists, Scott Barry Kaufman and David Yaden.

So we actually developed for the quiz to measure a person's tendency to these kinds of states of bittersweetness.

And the kinds of questions that we asked were, do you draw comfort or inspiration from a rainy day? Have other people referred to you as an old,

a quote, old soul? Do you react intensely to art or music or nature? Because the essence of

bitter sweetness is about, it's a kind of awareness of the way that joy and sorrow are forever

paired and the way that that realization unleashes in us a kind of piercing joy at the beauty

of the world.

This quiz, it's still in preliminary form, but from the preliminary studies that we did,

...