It’s okay not to be okay
29th September 2021
It’s okay not to be okay, to be a mess, to be scattered, to be sad, angry, bored, unmotivated and/or grumpy. We’re humans and those are states that humans can and do experience.
The issue comes when we judge ourselves for feeling this things, like is wrong, like we’re not good enough if we’re feeling his way, because on top of feeling something that it’s somewhat not pleasant, we put all sorts of melodramatic labels into a simple transient state of that the mind is experiencing.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t have to judge this states, we don’t have to identify with them and put labels on them like they’re good or bad, allowed and not allowed, to realise that they just are. Just like some days are sunny, some are cloudy, some are windy and some are all of those things combined! Some days we just don’t feel very good. It’s a totally normal natural part of the mental landscape we experience as humans and not the big deal we’ve made it to be.
One of the biggest misconceptions when we talk about happiness, is that happiness and other positive emotions are the only acceptable emotions and that negative emotions are just not good enough and that experiencing them makes us not good enough.
This takes us to a permanent state of trying to concoct situations and life experiences that put us in these positive states. We’re like junkies looking for our happiness fix and we’ll use any means to get it. Food, drugs, alcohol, TV, phones, clothes, lifestyle anything that we think we’ll make us feel those elusive positive states. As you’ve probably guessed by now, this is a mistake and doesn’t work, first and foremost because all those other emotions are also useful and are part of the emotional landscape that a full human being is. Life can be very complex and to constantly being in pursuit of one range of emotions doesn’t lead to the reward that we think it will.
To make matters worse we live in a world where marketers and big corporations have hijacked what natural and simple happiness is or would be, to make it all about what they want to sell you, which makes the whole pursuit nonsensical and void of any true meaning because even if you’re lucky enough to be able to gather all the elements of what a happy life it’s not going to make you feel happy anyway because it was someone else’s or worse still, some brand’s idea of happiness.