Sad Girl Season
The poetess Taylor Alison Swift said it best: All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February. Winter hath officially overstayed its welcome and we are capital D depressed! We only know one way to fight the doldrums of these final frozen months before the sun warms our sorry souls again–– so get in, loser. We're doubling down on melancholy.
KATIE THE SAD GIRL
I am writing this on Superbowl Monday with a Philly cheesesteak/tequila soda hangover. It's a painful day in America made worse by our country's refusal to declare it a bank holiday. Despite the horrors, last night, I dreamt of spring. I was looking out the window of my childhood home, and tulips were bursting out of the ground in real-time. I was so happy I cried a little. Cut to—I am scraping ice off my windshield with a debit card. Look, winter notoriously sucks. But I think it gets a bad rep, so I'm on a mission to rebrand seasonal anguish and not hide inside a metaphorical sarcophagus till May.
Rotting is sacred to me, and the cave I will live in until there is green on the trees will be decorated in beautiful shades of passionate sadness. AKA lots of white and shocks of red. As a double libra cancer rising––this is the most delusionally romantic big three (sun, moon, rising) a human could possibly have–– I identify as terminally nostalgic. This gives me an edge on the whole winter thing. The desolate months between the holidays and… well… June (I live in New England) allow me to sink into the melancholy that plagues me year-round.
I plan to watch movies that make me weep, from Manchester by the Sea to Bridges of Madison County, and abstain from alcohol from Monday – Thursday (that's Martini night) as a means to not dull my feelings (sober tears >>>>), and cry my way through as many Tracy Anderson mat classes as possible (the key is to mute her music and play The Smiths discography). When it's all too much, I'll simply plop myself directly in the sun with a cigarette–– one per week like Gwyneth Paltrow–– and dream of spring.
After all, winter is not meant to be appreciated; it's meant to be endured. It teaches us something about our imagination. And lately, mine's been so vivid that I stopped bringing my phone to the bathroom. How Victorian! I credit my sad girl indulgences with this abundant mindscape.
LIZ THE SAD GIRL
When I wasn't brooding while listening to Fiona Apple on my MP3 player or falling in love with every male with a pulse that crossed my path (also a libra), I did learn a few things about the poetic beauty of sadness in university. There's something called pathetic fallacy, a literary device used by many of the Victorian novelists and romantic poets I studied as an English major, that still informs how I experience the chilling depths of winter. When employing pathetic fallacy, writers attribute human emotions to inanimate objects - like the weather - to reflect a character's feelings and set a vibe. A classic example comes from the ultimate sad girl, Emily Brontë who in Wuthering Heights writes of the wild and stormy weather on the moors (god I'd die to go to a moor) to mirror Heathcliff's passionate and turbulent nature. All this to say, as a literary romantic, I find joy and peace in the notion of letting the cold, damp weather of a Pacific Northwest winter influence my moods. Because life imitates art and art imitates life, I welcome the call of winter to stay inside, rest, and consume content that makes me even more maudlin than I already am.
A growing genre of sad girl canon that I am particularly fond of is sad mom content. This winter, I've been romanticizing the plight of motherhood by watching films like Night Bitch (because what postpartum mom hasn't become feral with exhaustion and resentment?) and reading Sarah Hoover's account of her journey with postpartum depression, The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood. When I want to meet sorrow with sorrow, I reach for the works of iconic sad moms like Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion.
The thing that makes winter sadness bearable, and in my and Katie's case, indulgent and novel, is that it doesn't last forever. Oh, and I also take Zoloft! But knowing that in a few short weeks, the buds will start to emerge from frozen ground, the days will get longer, and the hope of spring will fill the air, I feel emboldened to make the most of my time with melancholy. I always return to Mary Oliver's poetry when I need a reminder that it won't be February forever. In fact, I even have "Wild Geese" framed above my desk. Her words let me see the beauty in the death of winter and serve as a constant reminder that spring will always come again.
There's still plenty of time for artful introspection and dethawing your winter soul in the company of some of our favourite sad girls. Here's a non-exhaustive list of what we're watching, reading, listening to, and feeling right now.
Books
If we're being honest, sad girl lit fic is our genre of choice all year round, but here are some of the stories we come back to when winter is calling us to feel deeply:
Liz's favourites: Virgin Suicides, Girl, Interrupted, The Bell Jar, My Year of Rest & Relaxation
Katie's favourites: Last Summer in the City (lots of yearning + set in Italy– swoon!), Homesick For Another World, Conversations With Friends, The Awakening
Films/ TV
After Brontë came Sofia Coppola, who's films made sadness art. If you haven't watched her entire filmography, there's no better time to catch up. She brings beauty and glamour to her stories of melancholy, misunderstood female protagonists. We love them all, but for ultimate sad girl vibes, Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and Priscilla are required viewing. For more reasons to weep, may we suggest:
Maria (the Maria Callas biopic starring Angelia Jolie)
Normal People
Conversations with Friends
Fleabag ("I love you…" "It will pass" we'll never get over it)
Blue Valentine
Frances Ha (this scene has been bookmarked for Katie since 2014)
Bridges of Madison County
Past Lives
Music
Before we get into any other sad girl tunes, let us all bow down to Lana Del Rey, whom I (Katie) owe all of my creativity. This woman taught me my sadness was a thing of beauty. She spoke directly to hopeless romantics and said: go forth into that doomed affair; do it for your art. My love life would be much less daring without her lyrical guidance, but then again, so would my writing. Because you can't stare pensively out a window in silence, more music to make you emote:
Taylor Swift is mother, and Gracie Abrams her successor
Phoebe Bridgers
Fiona Apple
Amy Winehouse
Joni Mitchell
The Smiths
The Marias ('No One Noticed' is anthemic)
Mazzy Star
Dark Academia (Because we can't write to music with lyrics, and very sadly, that is how we make money)
Vibes
When we want to embody the spirit of the sad sisters that came before us, here's what we do:
Create vibey Pinterest boards (Katie's 2025 board, Liz's 2025 board)
Read poetry (Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy to break your heart, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver to put it back together, Persephone the Wanderer by Louise Glück to wax philosophical about it all)
Take long, contemplative walks
Rest like Otessa Moshfegh's protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It can be medicated or not! It's what we should be doing right now according to Ancient Chinese Medicine
Browse bookstores
Embrace solitude
Wear oversized sweaters
Write bad poetry
Stare out the window and cry
If you MUST work out, do it to sad songs like Amsterdam by Coldplay
Wear dark red lipstick in the daylight
Build altars
We wanted to leave you with hope because spring will come, and no one does bittersweet better than Louise Glück.
Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,
bits of green were showing.
Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty
the healer, the teacher—
death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.
-Louise Glück