If you feel things at depth and suspect something is missing that other people seem to have, you have probably been handed a lot of advice about cheering up. Scripture does something different. It gave grief its own book and put it in the canon.
The Turn Sits Inside the Grief
Lamentations was written after Jerusalem fell. The city is destroyed, the temple is gone, and the book does not fix any of that. It ends unresolved.
In the middle of chapter 3, this happens:
"I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:19-23).
Watch the mechanism, because it isn't a mood swing. He remembers the affliction, and says plainly that his soul is downcast. Then: yet this I call to mind. He deliberately puts something else next to it. The compassions are new every morning, and he calls that to mind on purpose, in the same paragraph as the bitterness and the gall.
Both are in the text. The grief is not withdrawn and the hope is not delayed until the grief finishes. And then the book goes on being sad for two more chapters.
Your Feeling Is Not a Problem to Be Managed
So God is not asking you to stop feeling the depth of things. He put an entire book of sustained lament in scripture, plus a third of the Psalms, and he did not attach a resolution to all of them.
That's worth having, because you've probably learned that your emotional range makes other people uncomfortable and concluded that it's a defect. It isn't. It's why you can sit with a grieving friend when everyone else has run out of things to say, and why you notice beauty that people walk past.
What the passage adds is the practice of calling something else to mind. Not instead of the feeling. Next to it. The writer does it by naming God's character, out loud, while still downcast.
So write two lists in the same sitting. What is actually hard right now, in full, no editing. And what is true about God regardless. Don't let the second one cancel the first.
The Comparison Will Eat You
Here's the hard part, and it's specific.
The habit under this type is the sense that other people got something you didn't, and that everybody else's ordinary life has an ease in it that yours is missing. It's not envy of things exactly. It's more like being locked out of something.
That instinct will find evidence anywhere, including in church, where you'll watch somebody's uncomplicated faith and feel both contempt and longing at once.
The passage answers it, but not the way you'd expect. It doesn't tell the writer he's special. It tells him God's compassions are new every morning, which is a thing being given to everyone in the city, including the people he'd rather not be compared with. What you're missing is not a unique portion. It's the ordinary one, arriving daily, that you'll have to accept on the same terms as everybody else.
Ordinary Practice, on Ordinary Days
The other thing worth saying is that your faith needs a floor.
If the depth of your experience is the measure, then flat days will feel like absence and you'll go looking for the intensity somewhere else. Put in something that doesn't depend on how the morning feels. The same ten minutes. The same chair. A short passage.
The writer of Lamentations says the compassions are new every morning. That's a daily delivery, not an event, and it arrives whether the morning feels like anything or not. You have to show up on the mornings that aren't remarkable to find out that he was right.
Who Else Wrote It Down Sad
The Enneagram doesn't appear in scripture. Grief does, at length, from people God kept using.
The writer of Lamentations records five chapters of it and doesn't resolve them. David writes psalms that swing from despair to trust and back inside one poem. Naomi comes home from Moab and tells the whole town to stop calling her by her name, because it means pleasant and she has stopped being that. And Jesus, standing outside Lazarus' tomb, minutes from raising him, wept first.
Try These
Try these for a month. Write the two lists in one sitting, the hard one and the true one, and let both stand. Keep one practice that runs on flat days. When the comparison starts, name what you think the other person has and then say out loud what has actually been given to you. And take a look at the Heart center, where 2, 3, and 4 sit together. The family resemblance between the three is usually a surprise to all of them.
The book does not end happily. It's still in the Bible, and the man who wrote it said great is your faithfulness in the middle of it.