Be Kind… to Yourself

The kindest thing I did today was give up.

I drank the water. I swallowed the pills. I even did a breathing exercise I found online designed to stimulate my vagus nerve…

And none of it could even remotely shake whatever voodoo funk I’d woken up with. You know the kind I mean – you feel like you can remember the words for “sunshine”, and “smile”, and “lolly-pop”, but you don’t remember what they mean…

I rallied round for a few hours, desperately doing things to try to make myself feel better. And then I got sick of it. And I gave up. And the moment I got sick of it and gave up and just accepted how I awful I felt, I felt better. Not “better” in the sense that the black fog had suddenly left me, but “better” in the sense that I didn’t feel as bad as before. Hey, I’ll take that.

I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, other than to say that sometimes you’re going to wake up feeling like you’ll never be happy again. You need to remember two things.

One, that it’s not true – you will be happy again.

But two, if all you do is tell yourself thing number one, and try to push the feeling down, you’ll wake up the same way tomorrow.

I know it doesn’t seem right that accepting horrible feelings that you don’t want to feel is the path to ultimately feeling better, but it is. Feelings – even the horrible ones – want to be felt. The more you run from them, the more damage they will do in the long run.

So next time you wake up feeling like death, be kind to yourself. Drink the water. Swallow the pills. And as soon as you possibly can, give up.

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