The Uncomfortable Business of Getting What You Want

I Was So Busy Getting Better, I Forgot to Feel Bad.

What if getting where we want to go requires us to make room for the very things we're trying to escape?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the contradictions of being human.

How sometimes, to get what we want, we have to be willing to experience the exact opposite.

Take peace, for example.

If you want to live a peaceful life, sometimes you have to be a bitch.

And I mean that.

We don't typically associate being a bitch, an asshole, or even being ruthless with cultivating peace. We tend to think of peaceful people as gentle, agreeable, accommodating. People who don't make waves.

But I've come to realize that if you want to protect your peace, you have to be pretty fucking ruthless about what gets access to it.

You can't tolerate everything. You can't indulge everyone. You can't keep giving your time, attention, and energy to things that consistently take more than they give.

And sometimes that means being the villain in someone else's version of the story.

You can feel completely at peace with a decision while someone else thinks you're being a selfish asshole for making it.

I think that's one of the hardest parts for people. We're so concerned with how other people perceive us that we're willing to compromise our own peace to maintain their perception of us.

And there's the contradiction.

Sometimes, to become the peaceful person you want to be, you have to be willing to look like the opposite.

That particular contradiction doesn't bother me much anymore. I've gotten pretty comfortable with being misunderstood if the alternative is abandoning myself.

But lately, I've been wrestling with another version of this same idea.

And this one is a hell of a lot harder.

What if, to experience more positivity in my life, I have to make more room for negativity?

Not just acknowledge it. Not just give it a quick nod before finding a more productive way to think about it.

Actually let it exist.

Let it bubble up. Sit with it. Feel the grief, the anger, the disappointment, the hurt. Give those feelings some airtime without immediately trying to turn them into something useful.

Because I'm beginning to wonder if I was so anxious to get to the other side of some very difficult experiences that I didn't give myself enough time to actually move through them.

Over the past couple of years, I've experienced some pretty significant, life-changing circumstances.

And at the time, I genuinely believed I was doing the work.

I felt the feelings. I cried. I reflected. I tried to understand what had happened, what it meant, what I could learn from it, and how I wanted to move forward.

I did a lot of processing.

Or at least I thought I did.

Now, more than a year removed from some of those experiences, I'm starting to question whether I processed what I needed to or whether I processed just enough to make the difficult feelings manageable.

Enough to get back on my feet.

Enough to function.

Enough to convince myself I was ready for whatever came next.

But was that actually enough?

Or was I just in such a hurry to feel better that I stopped giving myself permission to feel bad?

I think we're often so desperate to get to the other side of something painful that we start measuring our progress by how quickly we can stop hurting.

We want to be healed. We want to be positive. We want to move forward.

And I understand that. I really fucking do.

Because sitting with grief and disappointment and all the raw, ugly emotions that come with difficult life experiences can feel unbearable.

Sometimes it feels like torture.

Why would I willingly sit in something that hurts when the entire goal is to get to a place where it doesn't?

But that's exactly the contradiction I'm beginning to understand.

Maybe the way out isn't always to get away from the feeling.

Maybe sometimes the way through is to let it have the space it needs.

And now I'm looking back over the past year and asking myself some uncomfortable questions.

What would my life look like today if I had truly honored what I needed back then?

Would my relationships look different?

Would the company I've kept look different?

Would I have made different decisions if I had allowed myself to sit with more of the grief, the anger, the disappointment?

Did I move toward certain people or situations because I genuinely wanted them in my life, or because some part of me was still trying to avoid feelings I hadn't finished dealing with?

That's a difficult question to ask yourself.

And I don't necessarily have the answer.

But I am beginning to recognize that some of the things I thought I'd worked through are still very much present.

Not necessarily in the same way they were a year ago. Sometimes they're quieter. Sometimes they show up in my reactions, my expectations, or the way I interpret what's happening around me.

And I'm wondering how much of the past year has been colored by feelings I thought I'd already put to rest.

I also wonder whether I did myself a disservice by trying to make those feelings go away so quickly.

At the time, I thought I was helping myself.

I thought I was choosing healing.

And maybe I was, to the extent that I could manage it then.

I don't want to dismiss the work I did or the version of me who was doing her best to get through some really difficult shit.

But the me of today is realizing that there may have been more underneath the surface than I was willing or able to sit with.

Maybe I did a lot of surface healing and then swept the rest under the rug.

And now I'm finding out what's under there.

The thing is, I'm not sure there's some magical point where we can declare ourselves completely finished processing an experience.

Maybe I'm still processing.

Maybe I'll be processing parts of these experiences for a long time.

And maybe that's not evidence that I've done something wrong.

But I do think there's a difference between allowing a feeling to move through you and rushing it out the door because you don't want it hanging around.

And I'm starting to recognize how often I've done the latter.

I've become pretty good at noticing my thoughts, identifying patterns, and understanding where certain reactions might be coming from.

But awareness and allowing are two different things.

I can understand exactly why I'm feeling something and still be uncomfortable as hell actually feeling it.

I can recognize an old pattern and still want to immediately reframe the thought, find the lesson, or redirect myself toward something more positive.

And lately, I'm questioning whether that instinct to make everything better has occasionally gotten in the way of letting myself experience what was actually there.

What if I don't need to make every difficult feeling better the moment it arrives?

What if I can just let it be difficult?

What if I can be sad without immediately searching for the silver lining?

Angry without trying to justify or intellectualize it?

Disappointed without reminding myself of all the things I have to be grateful for?

What if I can let a feeling exist without treating it like a problem I'm supposed to solve?

That's what I'm practicing right now.

I'm trying to sit with myself a little longer.

I'm trying to pay attention to the difference between my intuition and my anxiety, because I've learned that those two can sound an awful lot alike when you're not really listening.

I'm questioning the thoughts that come up without immediately deciding they're true.

And when difficult feelings resurface, I'm trying something different.

I'm not rushing to flip them.

I'm not immediately reframing them into something more positive or productive.

I'm giving them a little more airtime.

And I'm noticing that this is much harder for me than telling someone no, setting a boundary, or being perfectly comfortable with someone thinking I'm a bitch.

Apparently, I can be ruthless about protecting my peace from other people.

Learning how to make peace with what's happening inside me?

That's a whole different fucking assignment.

But maybe those two things aren't as different as they seem.

Both require me to tolerate discomfort.

Both require me to stop organizing my choices around what feels easiest in the moment.

And both ask me to trust that something uncomfortable can still be necessary.

I want peace, so I have to be willing to disappoint people.

I want more positivity, so I have to be willing to experience negativity.

I want to trust my intuition, so I have to be willing to sit with the uncertainty long enough to distinguish it from anxiety.

I want to move forward, so I may need to spend some time looking at what I was so eager to leave behind.

There's something fascinating about that polarity.

The idea that the thing we're avoiding might actually be part of the path toward the thing we're trying to create.

And I don't think that means we have to spend our lives reliving painful experiences or digging endlessly for something else to heal.

I certainly don't want to make a career out of suffering.

But I also don't want to keep mistaking the absence of an uncomfortable feeling for evidence that I've fully worked through it.

Because I'm beginning to see that those are not necessarily the same thing.

So this is where I am right now.

A little over a year out from some things I thought I'd already made peace with, realizing there might be more to feel.

Wondering what might have looked different if I'd given those feelings more room the first time around.

And trying not to turn that realization into another reason to be hard on myself.

I can't go back and give that version of me something she didn't know she needed.

But I can pay attention to what the version of me standing here today is asking for.

And right now, she's asking me to stop being in such a fucking hurry to get to the good part.

To let some things hurt.

To let some things be disappointing.

To let grief and anger and sadness have their moment without assuming they've taken over the entire story.

Because maybe making room for the feelings I don't want is part of making room for the life I do.

I don't know exactly what that will change.

I don't know whether my relationships will look different, whether my decisions will become clearer, or whether I'll look back a year from now and understand something I can't quite see today.

But I'm willing to find out.

And maybe that's the next part of my rewrite:

Learning that sometimes, to get where I want to go, I have to tolerate walking in the opposite direction.