A sad thing happened. And as I often do, I went to the writing to try to process. I got to a stopping point, and I checked in with myself, and I found that I didn't feel better. "I guess I didn't process," I said.
Except.
It is natural that we don't like to feel challenging emotions like sadness and anger and fear. They don't feel good. Being happy is just so much more fun.
Usually, when we say, "I feel better," we mean better as an adjective that modifies I: you've replaced the challenging emotion with one that's more welcome. You've moved from angry towards calm, fearful towards safe, sad towards happy.
But it's also possible to say, "I feel better," and mean better as an adverb, modifying feel. You have moved away from numbness, and you are now more fully feeling what is there to be felt.
From that perspective, I realized that I did in fact feel better. Before I sat down to write, I had a sense that I felt sad. Afterwards, a gray, fatiguing sadness weighed me down. I may not have liked the feeling. But a sad thing happened, and after exploring it in the writing, I felt sad.
Trust the zero drafts and they will point you towards the truth.