Some people live in direct sunlight; others have deep ancestral roots in faraway lands where the sun was mostly shrouded by fog and misty sea spray.

This is an essay about existing within a slower, deeper, more velvety frequency which shapes how I see and create.

It’s for anyone who has ever felt “too contemplative” for this loud world, and is learning that depth isn’t a flaw – it’s a form of love and survival.

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“Melancholy-Contemplative Baseline”

An essay by Shelly Moore Caron

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Baseline: Contemplative + Melancholy

There are, of course, as we are a gradient spectrum indefinite – people whose default setting seems to be pure sunlight – easy laughter, active bodies, and a mostly untroubled musical hum in their chest.

Then there are others who wake each morning already tuned to a lower yet somehow deeper, richer… more velvety frequency.

Not sad exactly, just hyper-aware: of dust caught in beams of light, of how quickly that light fades, of how everything beautiful ultimately carries an expiration date.

For most of my forty-some-odd years on this planet, I genuinely thought this meant something was very wrong with me. I’d watch the world rushing toward noise and brightness while I hovered cautiously at the edges, quietly absorbing it all. It took years to realize this undertone of melancholy wasn’t mental illness; it was temperament. A kind of emotional gravity that keeps me from drifting too far from what’s real. It’s the frequency at which my soul currently resides. It’s my home.

My melancholy makes me deeply contemplative. It slows me down like thick molasses – enough to notice what few do: the way a leaf decays into lace, the quiver in someone’s voice when they say “I’m fine,” the bittersweet of first coffee on a cold winter morning.

It’s the same depth that makes my writing possible, the same attunement that turns solitude into conversation with everything that breathes.

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The Gifts of Melancholy

Melancholy gives far more than it takes, at least most days.

It grants texture to emotion, contrast to joy.

It teaches empathy the way shadow teaches light. I can sense the tremor beneath smiles and feel the stories hiding between words. It’s what makes art feel alive to me – because I can see the ache that shaped it.

It also keeps me brutally honest.

I don’t chase constant happiness anymore; I’ve learned it’s a flicker, not a destination. Mere blips on the radar of a long-lived life.

The steadier place is somewhere between awe and acceptance, where beauty and grief share a table and pour each other tea.

That’s where I tend to live.

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The Weight

Of course, there’s a definite – and sometimes unbearable – heaviness to carrying that much awareness.

Some mornings, the gravity feels too strong to lift.

It can turn stillness into stagnation, reflection into rumination… with depression acting as a monster at the bottom of the tightrope chasm, ready to violently devour your soul if you lose your footing.

People mistake melancholy for sadness or disinterest, not realizing it’s just the mind folding inward to process the world’s noise.

There are certainly numerous days I wish I could lighten the f*ck up, float a little, stop cataloguing every emotion like it’s integral data that desperately needs interpreting right this very instant.

But even in those moments, I know this depth is also my gift.

You can’t write from the surface.

You can’t connect from it either.

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Integration

I’ve stopped trying to fix my baseline.

I make room for the melancholy the way you make room for a cat that always returns home – open the door, let it in, let it settle, give it love. I give mine music, good food, and candlelight… along with small, beautiful things to feed on so it doesn’t feed on me.

When joy shows up, I don’t question it. I let it sit beside the melancholy, because they’re not enemies – they’re siblings.

Both remind me I’m alive, still feeling, still paying attention.

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Closing

Maybe some of us were simply never meant to be featherlight and carefree.

Maybe our purpose is to listen so closely that we hear what others miss, and to write it down so the world can remember.

Melancholy isn’t the absence of light – it’s what gives light its depth.

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