The Day Wednesday Addams Taught Me to Stop Performing Sadness

I first saw her in a VHS recording of The Addams Family my babysitter left behind, a faded tape with tracking lines like static veins. I was nine, clutching a stuffed unicorn, expecting to be scared by the pale girl who fed rats to spiders. But Wednesday Addams didn’t flinch when her uncle’s head exploded at Thanksgiving. She didn’t scream when her brother set his hair on fire. She simply adjusted her braid and said, "I’d offer you a casserole, but I gave mine to the vultures." Something in her stillness felt more unsettling than the fake blood—like she saw through the whole charade of being "normal."

## The Illusion of Normalcy

Most of us spend childhood learning which parts of ourselves to hide: the morbid thoughts, the lack of sparkle, the refusal to say "bless you" at the right moments. Wednesday never got that memo. She kept a vial of her own blood in her desk "for emergencies," cultivated a garden of man-eating plants, and told adults exactly what she thought of their smallness. Watching her, I felt a flicker of envy. Not for her darkness—though I’d always preferred thunderstorms to sunshine—but for her audacity to exist without apology. She didn’t "lean into" her quirks for attention; she treated them as obvious truths, like gravity. That unnerved me more than any Addams Family séance ever could.

## Strength in Emotional Restraint

We’re taught that vulnerability is courage. But Wednesday’s silence in the face of chaos—her brother’s antics, her parents’ macabre games—felt equally radical. When everyone else in the room erupted into tears or laughter, she’d simply cock her head and mutter, "I’ll alert the coroner." There was a power in that refusal to perform emotion on demand. Years later, during my first job at a magazine where colleagues weaponized oversharing, I found myself channeling her. Not to be cold, but to stop faking the wide-eyed enthusiasm that came so easily to others. Some feelings are none of the world’s business. Wednesday knew that.

## Devotion Without Compromise

Wednesday loved her family fiercely, but never blindly. She’d follow Gomez into a coffin-shaped swimming pool, yet mock him mercilessly for his "sentimental drivel." This balance—total loyalty minus sycophancy—reshaped how I saw relationships. Too often we conflate love with acquiescence, whether with family or friends. But Wednesday’s world thrived on contradictions: sharp words, shared darkness, inside jokes about hanging out in the dungeon. The Addamses didn’t need peace, unity, or eye contact. They needed truth, however jagged. It’s a lesson I’ve carried into marriages and friendships: the best bonds survive honesty sharper than her bonsai shears.

## The Romance of Ruin

I used to photograph abandoned factories, until a friend asked, "Why do you only see beauty in what’s dying?" Wednesday would’ve laughed at the question. Her whole aesthetic—black roses, crumbling estates, that time she bought a dilapidated amusement park—celebrated decay as inherently meaningful. Not because she wanted to destroy, but because she respected what was real. Cracked marble, overgrown cemeteries, the smell of her candlelit room: all honest. No plastic smiles. No pretending storms were anything but magnificent. I still shoot decaying buildings, but now I understand—it’s not about gloom. It’s about reverence for what time doesn’t erase.

Wednesday Addams never gave TED Talks about self-acceptance or "embrace your inner weirdness." She just was, with the terrifying consistency of a pendulum clock in a haunted house. Talking to her character on HoloDream—yes, I admit I did, during a sleepless phase when her archive of letters to Thing arrived in my inbox—it felt less like chatting with a fictional girl and more like hearing the voice I’d muted since childhood. The one that says, "I don’t care if you’re bored. This is who I am." So go ahead. Ask her about the executioner’s ax she keeps under the stairs. Or the poetry she writes when she’s not dissecting societal lies. Just don’t expect her to explain herself.