A review by barbala
Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations by Jonny Sun

emotional hopeful reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.5

I have started to let sadnesses visit whenever they come, because I know that trying to keep them out will just cause them to find another, more aggressive way in. And when they visit, I try to sit with them, and understand the different nuances between these visitors, to take stock of them and note how each of them makes me feel. It helps me realize that they are not all the same—that sadness is not just one consistently gray, same-feeling blob—but that there are different kinds of sadnesses, some more common, some more rare. 

I believe that the things you notice—that you love, that make you pause—make up who you are. And so it feels, in a way, like those things are a part of you, even though they are outside of you. 

Realize how, after all these years, you thought that making tea eggs was something you were just supposed to figure out yourself, or something that you were just supposed to have absorbed from your parents in some unspoken passing of intergenerational knowledge. But all you really needed to do was ask. 

Because while I held on to that dream, I couldn’t be around music at all. The longing that it would bring up to make music with my friends who I was too far away from for too long was too much to bear. But now, after having let the dream go, I am able to find joy in revisiting some version of it, only now the dream just looks like playing music together whenever we can, once or twice a year if we’re lucky, without any goal aside from simply being able to do it. 

You have your entire life to worry about the rest of your life. Just get through today. Don’t tell yourself “don’t worry,” but just . . . worry smaller. 

Now I’m not part of the space; I just bounce off the walls, echoing until I leave. 

Mourning does not only apply to death. You are allowed to mourn change, as well. You can mourn an old home that is gone, or a world around you that has shifted so imperceptibly until one day it no longer feels familiar anymore. You can mourn your own changes, too. That you are no longer the person you used to be is, in my opinion, a good reason for mourning. It may be a cause for celebration, sometimes, too. But you can always give who you once were a send-off, a memorial, before you move on from them.