Category: Uncategorized

I have a tendency to want to move on.

Not necessarily because I don’t feel things deeply. Quite the opposite, actually. I can feel something very deeply and then almost immediately start looking for the way out.

What’s the lesson here?

What am I supposed to do next?

How do I make this useful?

How do I stop feeling like this?

There is a certain appeal to those questions. They give us something to do.

And sometimes doing something is exactly what we need.

But sometimes something has happened and the appropriate response is simply:

That really sucked.

You failed the exam.

Someone broke your heart.

You didn’t get the job.

A friendship ended.

You were treated unfairly.

Something you wanted didn’t happen.

Someone you trusted hurt you.

Sometimes there isn’t a silver lining.

Sometimes there isn’t a lesson yet.

Sometimes you’re just sad.

Or angry.

Or disappointed.

And I think we’re often much less comfortable with that than we pretend to be.

We’re very good at talking about feelings as though they’re problems waiting for solutions.

Anger needs to be processed.

Sadness needs to be worked through.

Grief needs to be moved past.

Disappointment needs perspective.

And certainly, there are times when those things need attention. Feelings can tell us something important. They can change the way we understand ourselves, other people, and what has happened to us.

But I don’t think every feeling needs to immediately become productive.

Sometimes you need to wallow.

I mean that affectionately.

If someone breaks your heart, maybe you need a few days of terrible music, ugly crying, and telling your friend the same story for the sixth time.

If you didn’t get something you worked incredibly hard for, maybe you need to be disappointed before you start figuring out what’s next.

If someone has hurt you, maybe you need to be angry before you can decide what you want to do about it.

I don’t think wallowing means giving up.

I think sometimes it’s the opposite.

It’s acknowledging that something mattered enough to hurt.

There is a difference between feeling something and letting it run your life indefinitely.

The first is human.

The second is where we can become stuck.

And I don’t think anyone else gets to decide exactly where that line is for you.

There isn’t a universal number of days you’re allowed to be heartbroken.

There isn’t a socially acceptable amount of time to grieve a friendship.

There isn’t a deadline where disappointment is supposed to have become wisdom.

Some things take longer than others.

Some things seem finished until a completely ordinary Tuesday reminds you that they aren’t.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gone backwards.

It might simply mean there’s something there you haven’t finished feeling.

This is where I think about meditation.

For years, I thought meditation was about keeping my mind focused for twenty minutes. My mind would wander, I’d notice it, and then I’d berate myself for having wandered in the first place.

Which was particularly unhelpful once I understood that I was living with untreated ADHD.

Then someone explained it differently to me.

Your mind wanders.

You notice.

You bring it back.

And then it wanders again.

The return is part of the practice.

That was a genuinely cool revelation for me.

I hadn’t been failing at meditation. I’d misunderstood what I was supposed to be practising.

And I think feelings can work a little like that.

You can spend an afternoon feeling miserable about something and then laugh at a stupid video.

You can have a good day and still be grieving.

You can think you’re finally over it and then find yourself crying in the shower three weeks later.

You can decide you need a break from thinking about it and then come back when you have the capacity.

None of those things erase the others.

You don’t have to stay inside a feeling all day for it to be real.

You don’t have to keep yourself miserable to prove that something mattered.

And you don’t have to force yourself to feel better just because you think you should be.

Maybe moving forward isn’t always a clean line from feeling bad to feeling better.

Maybe sometimes it’s more like:

Feel it.

Step away.

Come back.

Keep going.

And then, when you need to, come back again.

The danger of ignoring difficult feelings isn’t that they’ll somehow punish you for being insufficiently emotionally aware.

It’s that they don’t necessarily disappear just because you’ve stopped looking at them.

They can turn into irritability.

Resentment.

Anxiety.

Numbness.

A vague sense that something is wrong without knowing what.

Sometimes they show up in places that have nothing obvious to do with where they began.

I’m not suggesting that every difficult emotion needs to be excavated until you’ve found its deepest possible meaning.

That sounds exhausting.

Sometimes you really are just having a bad day.

Sometimes you’re sad because you’re sad.

Sometimes you’re angry because someone was cruel.

Sometimes you’re disappointed because you wanted something and didn’t get it.

That can be enough.

And then you can decide what comes next.

Maybe you need to cry.

Maybe you need to complain.

Maybe you need to take a walk.

Maybe you need to watch something ridiculous.

Maybe you need to talk to someone who loves you.

Maybe you need to do absolutely nothing useful for a while.

And maybe tomorrow you’ll feel a little different.

Or maybe you won’t.

That’s okay too.

I don’t want wallowing to become another thing we can fail at.

There’s no gold star for processing your emotions efficiently.

There’s no achievement badge for turning pain into wisdom before anyone else.

And there certainly isn’t a little green owl waiting to shame you because you missed your emotional-growth streak.

Sometimes the next step is very small.

Sometimes it is simply admitting:

This hurts.

Then you make dinner.

You answer an email.

You watch something funny.

You go to bed.

And maybe tomorrow you come back to it.

That’s not standing still.

Sometimes feeling the thing is part of moving forward.