Mentally, I am here
It’s a sunny November morning and I woke up with the usual choice before me of leaning into the uneasy feelings or leaning into the light. I am luteal and tired, there’s a busted sewer line in my driveway that has caused a shit volcano down my sidewalk and a dent in my bank account. I’m sick, spread thin, someone important to me is in the hospital, and the political landscape of our country feels as bleak as ever.
Still, I leaned into the light this morning and found what was going right. This is new for me, respective to the rest of my life. I was someone unconsciously committed to being inexorably chained to the worst of things, who then moved into being someone relentlessly chasing down the best of things. And as that change happened, I’ve felt considerable social friction.
Many people have looked at me and decided, “Easy for her to say.” And that can be true, I won’t argue. There are many reasons my life is easier than others’ lives, maybe your life, I don’t know, but that feels like an invalidation that could be lobbed from person to person indefinitely, and serves only as distraction. There’s always someone who has things “easier” than we do. There are no doubt many people in the world with considerably less than I have with an even sunnier outlook on life than mine.
I spent years shackled to my thesis of suffering. I waved my dissertation around like an evangelist: LIFE IS SUFFERING! GET WITH IT! Sometimes it came out as a more casual, comedic admittance. “What are you gonna do? Everything sucks. (pours wine).”
I grew up in a chaotic, unpredictable, emotionally and physically violent home. I lived young life in a constrictive religious setting believing everyone is inherently bad. I still tried hard to be a good but always felt like an outsider because of my fractured family life. I left my childhood with unresolved trauma, a mood disorder or two, and a lot of attachment issues. While my parents weren’t in abject poverty, they also didn’t have money to spare; I grew up feeling money was inherently stressful.
I spent most of my twenties and a good chunk of my thirties wrestling with on and off severe depression and anxiety, trying SSRIs and other meds to feel comfortable in my own lived experience. Since I didn’t have the skills to know myself I was drawn to a relationship that touched on all my unresolved wounds. I spent years of my children’s early lives shouldering colicky babies and postpartum mental health issues mostly alone, if not physically then emotionally. I left my marriage and lost a lot of familial security. I left without a stable income or a clear plan on how to get one, and then shouldered the devastation of divorce while most of my family, by marriage or blood, watched me drown without lending a hand.
I also got cancelled on the Internet somewhere in there. I scrolled through page after page after page of strangers ripping me apart. I shut myself off from socializing or making any new friends out of self doubt and complete lack of trust in women. I endured the pandemic while I watched my dream job die and lost my mind with small children at home. I got just as angry as the rest of you when I watched what was happening politically and socially.
I sunk into bitterness, cynicism, anger and despair and called it caring, called it activism, called it justified. I railed about what a failure men were, collectively, and how fucked women were, collectively. I got angry at religion, white supremacy, men, politicians. I cried, I stomped. I reposted memes. I reposted violence and demanded everyone agree it was their responsibility to shove their nose in it, too. I fought with strangers online. I rehashed my divorce victim story until I had no air left in my lungs.
And after it all, I found myself more unhappy than ever.
None of this is shared because I think I deserve anyone’s pity. I’m not attached to any of that anymore, or the woman I was in those times. We are all subject to suffering, because we are all alive and to be alive is to experience the gamut. It’s simply to say that if I had wanted to continue on suffering, I could have gone on finding more data to support my suffering. All of us can. It’s just that I wanted to feel good.
As I have changed my own course, slowly as ever, I began to feel confusion over the pervasive narrative on the corners of the internet I inhabited. Mainly, that it’s non-negotiably my job to stay informed of every injustice at all times, and take action. In this case, staying informed meant agreeing to stay glued to screens and violence, and stay in the energy of outrage. And taking action meant endlessly reposting cynicism and hot takes to prove I was plugged in, on it. It also meant cutting out anyone who couldn’t see things the way I did, reserving my patience and curiosity only for those who voted like I did, insisting on everyone else’s inherent evil.
My divorce finally broke my spirit, so I turned into myself for over two years. It looked like months of expressing grief and anger in every blip of time I had, but this time, mostly offline. I was broken over everything, personally and collectively, and so I cried an ocean in my car, in my house, in my bathroom, in the park, into pillows, on the phone. I screamed. I wrote absolutely ballistic journal entries. I let my anger and grief at society take full form, without public demonstration or demand. I burned a bunch of shit in my fire pit outside. And finally, I decided I wanted to feel better.
All of it - my steeled identity of Depressed, Anxious, and Outraged, my white knuckle grip on being Shaken Up, Wronged, and Pissed, my commitment to rehearsing how badly I was doing and feeling because “look around, idiot!” - it all felt so bleak. It felt in some ways like a blindfold. It also eventually felt disloyal to the deepest nature inside of me. A nature that longed to create, grow, connect, love, expand. How had I gotten to a point where being at peace and feeling good as a human being felt like social suicide in my liberal bubble?
I noticed an intense resistance within me to letting go of my pain. I noticed that at first, feeling good felt like betrayal. I noticed that feeling better involved increasing my capacity to hold discomfort, pain, anger, and heartache. It involved expanding my ability to experience any emotion more calmly and say, “Yes, and - ” As I continued, I noticed an increased ability to stay curious rather than triggered, deeply secure in my own ideas and identity, and a decreased need to sink into perpetual anger or violently push away anyone that didn’t agree with me. Not because I agreed with everyone. Not because I didn’t care about the poor state of things. But because my peace of mind didn’t depend on the outer world at all, and because my peace of mind made me a better character in the play of the world.
It was not about pretending the outside world didn’t exist, or pretending that no one was suffering, or pretending that everyone around me was well-intentioned and safe. It was more of a remembering that you, myself, and the whole natural world, the people in every corner of the planet are all the same precious, miraculous material that owes everything to one another. Somehow, I had to get to a place where I could live from that energy.
As I continue to detach from online chaos and bring more of what I’m focusing on to the forefront, I am aware this feels unacceptable to some. I can see how someone focusing on their personal peace - joy, even! - during “times like these” feels like an affront, or betrayal, or a blind eye. I can see how those focusing on what is going right, finding what feels good, can feel trite, or ignorant, or selfish. But realistically, the entirety of human existence has been “times like these” in my estimation. It’s just more obvious now, with technology. Peace has always been a resistance.
Unplugging myself from the frenetic hamster wheel gave me emotional space. Emotional space gave me room to think. Room to think gave me room to self-evaluate, to calm down, to define, to re-route, to open up, to take the leash off that was yanking me back and forth, to have more mental agency. More agency gave me the chance to choose things that felt better. Choosing things that felt better gave me the clarity and drive to love better, speak better, move better, be better, give better.
So, I don’t find self-development, self-exploration, or relentlessly pursuing feeling good a problem, or naval-gazing, or short-sighted. I’m no longer embarrassed to be on a mission both personally and collectively to help people think better and consequently feel better. When I think and feel better, I am open rather than contracted. I am a flower blooming, not wilting. I am a river flowing, not stopped up. And it is in these places are where creation, generosity, connection, ideas, and love come.
Thank you for reading today’s long-winded letter. As always, I am grateful to have you here reading! If you’re new here, I’m Jolie, a full time coach, mother, and writer. My newsletter goes out twice a month, covering real-talk on topics like motherhood, personal growth, grief, change, religion, and more. If you’d like to connect with my work as a personal coach, where I work with women on overcoming their fear and truly living, you can find out more about my work here. I also just released a new workbook called Better Stories, helping you identify inner stories you hold that may be holding you back, and re-writing better ones that serve you and your joy, peace, and success. In your corner, Jolie