Is it weird to enjoy emotional pain?

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you would think that being sad or depressed would make you terrible, but in some ways I find it comforting. Is this weird?

Sometimes I feel a little dead inside and if I'm sad atleast I feel something.

No. It's not weird, at least for me, because it's a feeling that I can identify.

I usually don't really know what I'm feeling or why unless I'm depressed or hurt.

It's not weird, you're not weird, and it's all good. Even neurotypicals can enjoy emotional pain, though probably for different reasons not so reputable.

I would say that I'm probably a glutton for emotional pain, seems how I've been told by people who I trust that I have a tendency to create drama for myself where none should exist. I'm not sure why I do this, though someone I trust speculates that I fear being forgotten by those I love if there's no reason for them to worry about me.

Objectively, my life is going very well right now and I know that I need to stop taking things so seriously and being overly dramatic if I am to enjoy it. I'm currently making a conscious effort to lighten up, because I fear that when an actual tragedy does befall me, I'll look back on these good times and regret that I squandered them on cheap drama.

In a sense, it would be abnormal to not enjoy emotional pain. There is no good without bad and no positive without negative if it comes to emotions. The real question you have to ask is: Do you effectively enjoy being overall more dysfunctional? Because that is a real consequence and it is bad. Being depressed or sad if you can affort it is not. It all depends on the context and what matters is the end result.

I get that, I think - the way I experience it.

I wonder if it has something to do with the ideas that:

a) if it is a stronger emotion, it is easier to grasp because emotions can be so ambiguous - therefore, emotional pain "gives you something to hold"

b) It is a sensory stim.

c) stereotypical artist account here, it can be creative

Just thoughts ... and sorry for any ideas I have repeated, but sometimes saying things in different ways is good for the thought process - my theory

I believe that every emotion, whether positive or negative, is valuable and should be experienced to the fullest.

Sometimes I do. It sounds like too simple a reason, but it is just interesting.

Not me. I like to close my eyes and generate waves of pleasure down my neck and feel warm and happy for no reason. There are at least three emotion-related sensations that I can generate on a whim, and they all make me feel like I'm floating in happy warm ice cream. There's the cool, hair-raising effect, the throbbing warm body-wide effect, and then the almost indescribable head-down tingle that goes to my back, arms and lower back, but rarely into my legs. All of those are 10x more fun than emotional pain. Learn to make them. Better than drugs.

I think a lot of people seek out emotion, whether it's painful or pleasurable, the intensity is addictive. there are versions of this that are pathological (I had a room mate with histrionic personality disorder and another with borderline personality disorder...neither is fun for the person living it or the people around them) and to a certain extent I think this is normal.

French: la doleur exquise. "the exquisite pain".
Portuguese: saudade: " a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. It often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return" "a turning towards the past or the future".
Urdu: Ishq: through Persian, from the Arabic root for "vine", "that love which, like a vine, grows through the heart and chokes out anything else it once held"

on some level many of us suffer because we want to, because it's a rich experience even if it's a horrible one.

Just thinking of what you have said Ca2

My dad claims he is quoting Buddha but I don't know - he likes to say: Oh ye who suffer know ye not ye suffer of yourself?

Also - what is the chemical formula you have as a name?

At one point I felt much like this. I didn't have a happy childhood - I was confused, frustrated and scared by the world because I was undiagnosed and so people made no accommodations whatsoever for the sensitivities or behaviours caused by my autism. I don't blame my family in retrospect - without knowing that a child is autistic they could very easily just be perceived as "naughty" or "spoiled" which is exactly what happened in my childhood. As I grew into my teens I had moderately severe depression and retreated into my own world of fantasy. I felt completely misunderstood and frustrated that the world didn't seem to care about how difficult I was finding life. I hadn't really known a true feeling of belonging and comfort as a child and I never felt my parents love (presumably because of the autism). Because of the aforementioned difficulties I kinda wrapped myself in my depression like a blanket; using it as an armour and a wall against the world which I felt didn't want me. It felt like the only "adult" emotion I really knew at all at that time as an adolescent and so I derived a strange comfort from it and totally embraced it. I would also self-harm and that would provide a similar feeling of strange comfort.

Nowadays I don't feel that way at all. I despise every moment of my depression and feel no comfort or any other positive emotion from it. As much as it is more unpleasant as a result, the fact that I cannot so readily tolerate and embrace depression now at least powerfully motivates me to want to do something about it. That in itself is a double edged sword because when I cannot do anything about it it makes me more depressed. Overall I definitely wouldn't swap back to the way I used to feel as a teenager. Consciously digging a deeper and deeper pit of self pity and deliberate isolation like I did then is not constructive. I probably enjoy life far less right now at this exact moment because of my current way of dealing with it but I also know that my current way of dealing with it will eventually pay dividends - I just have to put up with the pain in the meantime; sometimes I think I can't cope with it but I am still here so I suppose that isn't the case.

*grouphug* to anyone who does now or ever has felt this way. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.