Every so often, I go through a phase where I feel more down. Through self-reflection, digital content and the therapy that I’m doing at the moment, I’ve come to recognise the rough pattern that I follow when the downward spiral begins. There’ll be some sort of trigger, then I’ll try to complete more things and rely on achievements to help me feel better. Sadly, it doesn’t really work, not least because I tend to do things on my own when I’m in that state, when what I need is connection.
Not only do I try to achieve things on my own, I also try to fix how I’m feeling on my own, but in doing so, I create an element of shame. Shame is one of those things that develops in the dark and so by keeping my emotions to myself, I turn them into something to be embarrassed about. That’s when the loneliness really kicks in and I feel not just rejected, but hopeless about creating connection in the future.
That’s not quite a full picture of what goes on, but it does provide a useful overview. So where am I going with this or am I just over-sharing online again? Bare with me and I will get to my point.
Mixed Messages
Several months ago, when I was going through another one of these phases, I was wondering about the phrase “it’s okay not to be okay.” It’s a great sentence, but doesn’t quite meet the reality check given people will often tell you not to feel your full range of emotions.
We’ve probably all been told “getting angry won’t help”, “don’t cry, it will be okay” and “cheer up”, the sentiment of each being that you should try to avoid challenging emotions. We do the same thing when it comes to failure, telling each other it’s okay to fail and then trying to help someone avoid failure by coming up with a reason why they actually succeeded.
By trying to avoid our challenging emotions and failure, we’re pushing those things into the dark. That puts us in a position where as much as we might say that it’s okay not to be okay and that it’s okay to fail, we have attached shame to those concepts.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” - James Baldwin
Pain and Healing
Something that I’ve learned recently is that pain is the door to healing.
To explain what I mean, I think it would be useful to go over the purpose of pain. My basic understanding is that pain is there to signal a threat to your wellbeing. There are some people who can’t feel pain and they’re the ones who end up losing a hand because they didn’t realise it was on top of a hot stove. Pain motivates change in order to protect our wellbeing and without it, we would die much sooner.
We use the experience of pain to predict threats. We remember what hurt us and so to survive, we avoid it in whichever way we can. However, much of what we perceive to be a threat isn’t actually one.
As a kid, if I was shouted out, I thought I had done something wrong, took the blame/thought that there was something wrong with me and felt rejected (and rejection is a threat because we evolved to survive in groups). As an adult[ish], I can now recognise that it's not personal; this person is probably having a bad time and taking it out on those around them. However, I still have that initial adverse reaction because of the beliefs I developed as a child when I simply did not know better.
The little t traumas we all inevitably experience as children, where our needs weren’t met for whatever reason, create a whole bunch of wounds. If these are left untreated, they will continue to manipulate our actions because our instinct tells us to recoil from the unpleasant experience that is pain.
However, as James Baldwin said: “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The willingness to lean into your pain stops it becoming a source of shame and turns it into a tool that helps you to identify your open wounds. You can then figure out what it is that you have learned to believe and, potentially with the help of a professional, start to unpick it. When you’re going through this process, remember that this is the you that needs the most love - judgement isn’t useful here, understanding is.
The Power of Failure
Failure can also be a tool. Failure is just the act of not achieving what you had originally intended, but we’ve mixed into that emotions like embarrassment, fear, shame, self-doubt and worthlessness, so much so that we talk about ‘feeling’ like we’ve failed. By confusing this action with an emotion, we lose the opportunity to understand why the actual emotions exist and to constructively address the underlying issues that those emotions point towards.
For failure to be a tool, we have to use a growth mindset. When we have a fixed mindset, we see failure as evidence of our ineptitude and that moment comes to define us. When we have a growth mindset, failure educates us. It tells us what went wrong, what we could do differently next time, what really matters to us, how powerful persistence is and more. Rather than being the antonym to success, failure can be its catalyst.
We Need It
So to answer the question partially posed in the title of this post: yes, it is okay to fail and it is okay to not feel okay. These things are inevitable, so there's no point in wishing them away. Instead, we can improve our relationship with the concepts, recognising them as healthy tools to teach us more about ourselves and others, and to help us feel comfortable fully expressing ourselves.
Please don’t hide how you feel, you have nothing to be ashamed about.
(a quick tip: if you’re worried about sharing how you feel face-to-face, start off by sending a text to someone you trust)
Further Learning
Someone that I listened to a lot over the last couple of months is someone called Gabor Maté, a physician with a special interest in childhood development and trauma (and how that presents later in life - e.g. through addiction). He has been in a bunch of podcasts recently and they have been so enormously useful to me, so I thought I’d share the episodes with you. The clips are long, but they’re absolutely worth spending the time.
Jay Shetty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTQJmkXC2EI
The Diary of a CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPup-1pDepY
Tim Ferris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY&t=527
Pain being the motivator for change is powerful, but also that “pain“ is just a concept that we badge as being negative and in essence it’s just a response to something - our body just telling us something - we tend to just react to the association with the feeling it gives us not the root cause.
Keep it up Fabe, loving the blog.