The Power of Bittersweet Emotions: Susan Cain on Turning Sorrow Into Creativity

How is it possible to want to laugh and cry at the same time? What are the benefits of sadness and longing? Why do we relentlessly march toward happiness when something deeper may be nearby?

These are some of the questions that brewed inside me as I immersed myself in Susan Cain’s latest book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Cain, a writer acclaimed for giving voice to the quiet, nuanced aspects of life, offers a poetic look at the emotional multitudes that lean toward melancholy. Think of the knot in your throat when hearing a transcendent symphony; or the tears that sprout watching a father toast his daughter at her wedding. This is what Cain calls the “bittersweet." She describes its as "a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; and acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.”

The idea for the book was sparked by Cain’s longtime love for the sorrowful music of Leonard Cohen. Why did her chest expand when she listened to his sounds? she wondered. In awe at Cohen’s “ability to transform pain into beauty,” Cain went on a quest, years later, to find out why she felt this way. What resulted was an unexpected swell of information around the untapped potential of the bittersweet.

Weaving personal stories with research from the fields of epigenetics, neuroscience, spirituality, and more, Cain’s Bittersweet is a bold compass to understanding those feelings in life that teeter on the edges of joy, pain, nostalgia, and sorrow. It helps you see with greater clarity that by leaning into the “quiet force” of bittersweet we ultimately live with greater creativity, gratitude, and love.

A Conversation with Susan Cain

You write that you’ve been working on Bittersweet since 2016, but in a lot of ways, you’ve been working on it your entire life. As you wrote and researched this book over the years, what did you learn that surprised you?

I started out as a very deep agnostic, and I remained an agnostic, but I started to understand that the thing that I experience when I listen to a certain type of music or when I find myself in a clearing in the woods is the same thing that people call God. This has been a real spiritual evolution for me. I started writing this book wanting to answer the narrow question about what it was about bittersweet music that had such a profound effect on me, but that then opened into a much bigger quest to understand the whole bittersweet tradition that's in art and music and sports, even.

I started realizing that the most organizing principle of humanity is coming into the world with a sense of longing for a different and more beautiful world. Most of the time we let our religions express this for us, and then we go about our day-to-day lives of earning a living, raising our children, exercising, and all the things that we do. We have that side of ourselves corded off as that's what you do in church on Sundays, if you still go. But I've come to realize how much all of life is suffused with that spirit and that longing.

You shed light on the finality of things in life, and how we’re always surrounded by portals, or “enchanted entryways” as you call them, to a deeper realm. What do you hope readers take away from this?

We know from all the data and the studies, which I have throughout the book, how much being attuned to the state of impermanence and finality and fragility opens us up to a sense of meaning and transcendence and preciousness. That is what I hope people take away.

Being on the subject for the last few years has completely transformed my experience of everyday life.

As I talk to you, I happen to be looking out the window and there's an old man walking his dog. It’s so incredibly beautiful, this scene. There’s a kind of enchantment all around us, and there's a paradox in that the more aware of impermanence and fragility we are, the more we see this enchantment everywhere.

You created a quiz to help people understand their levels of bittersweetness. Will you walk us through this?

The quiz measures how prone you are to bittersweet states of mind or being. It asks questions like: How intensely do you react to art or music or nature? And do you experience goosebumps several times a day? I constructed the quiz and then I worked with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Dr. David Yaden to analyze the data. I developed the quiz toward the end of the writing of the book. I didn't know what the data analysis would yield. But sure enough, we found that people who score high in bittersweetness on this quiz also tend to score high on a predisposition to creativity, and to experiencing states of awe, wonder and transcendence - everything I’d been experiencing, all those years, listening to sad music! Sure enough, it all came out in the quiz results. So that was fascinating.

What’s also fascinating is that I've spoken to several people who literally scored a zero on the quiz. I have a life philosophy that there's a diversity of superpowers that are available to us, and each person is given different ones in this life. And so this book, I think, is shining a light on the undervalued superpower of bittersweetness. But people who score zero on the quiz have access to some other superpower. These are usually people who are super optimistic, super upbeat, and are in a great mood all the time—and that brings treasures of its own.

For the person who feels fear or trepidation around exploring their bittersweet, what do you say?

I would first say to look at the data, which shows that leaning into that side of ourselves brings us closer to meaning and gratitude. It orients us toward our deeper relationships. There’s less anger and frustration, and more satisfaction. Also, bittersweetness is a great catalyst for creativity.

On a more personal or emotional side, there comes a time in every human life, just because of existence being precarious the way it is, where troubles are going to come to you. Being in touch with this side of existence, I believe, makes you less blindsided when the trouble comes. I had this experience because I had been working on this book for years before the pandemic. I lost my father and my brother to COVID. People have asked me many times if the experience of losing them changed the way I wrote the book. My answer was, no, it didn't. It's more that the book changed my reaction to grief. I sort of understand it all differently because I've been so immersed in thinking about these things.

Thank you for sharing that about your father and your brother. I am so sorry. What are some tools or practices for leaning into the bittersweet?

Start your day with an act of beauty, by finding something that you experience as very beautiful. And maybe share it with other people, whether with your team members, or a friend. In my case the whole time I was writing this book, every morning I would choose a favorite piece of art and pair it with a quote or an idea. Then I posted it on social media. Somehow, immersing myself that way and then sharing it, got me into the perfect state of mind for writing. And it wasn't anything about sorrow explicitly. It’s rather that works of art and beauty contain within them all of the joy and sorrow of human experience. Beauty is a good entry point, even for people who aren't oriented toward the melancholic—because everyone likes beauty!

A second practice is expressive writing, which I wrote about in the book. That comes from the work of psychologist James Pennebaker. The idea is that you sit down and spend two minutes writing about your troubles. You're not trying to write about them in any kind of amazing way. You know, you could rip up the paper as soon as you're done. But Pennebaker has found that the very act of writing things down literally improves our health and makes us more successful. He did one study where he took a group of 50-year-old engineers who’d been laid off, and were depressed about it. He had half of them do expressive writing every morning. And then the other half wrote about something mundane, like what they were wearing. The ones who wrote about their troubles were much more likely to have found work a few months later. They had lower blood pressure, a better state of mind. It's astonishing that one little practice could yield so much—but it really did.

Susan Cain is an award-winning author, journalist, and speaker. You can learn more about Cain at susancain.net, and you can order her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, here.