The psyche is surprisingly malleable, apparently. I hope to test this hypothesis this year, with plans to release the following updates:
1. Feeling genuine happiness for other people
Much of my unhappiness stems from finding joy excruciating to witness. When I see someone share good news, achieve something impressive, or simply announce that they are enjoying life, I reflexively begin to feel incredibly, deeply sad. All good things point to some lack in me, resulting in this twisted dynamic where I often prefer knowing other people are not doing very well.
This sucks. It especially sucks when trying to deal with heartbreak. My ex said he would feel deeply happy if I found love. I told him I would be utterly and absolutely devastated if he found love. This is quite normal, but also, I do not want to live this way.
I would like to be able to feel happy for other people. I would like for other people's good news to fuel me and a deeper optimism in humanity.
I believe this requires:
a) understanding that life is not a zero-sum game; that good things are not finite. A good thing happening to someone else does not imply that you are deficient in some important way, or that fewer good things await you.
b) loving yourself. A lot of jealousy is downstream of wanting to feel loved. And many things feel like a reminder that you are not loved (an ex moving on, a friend getting engaged while you are still single, etc.). If you are able to produce a constant reservoir of self-love somewhere deep within you, a belief that you really are okay in whichever form you take, the pangs of sadness will not feel so bad.
Treating yourself this way also makes you more receptive to love when it does come along. Love is most pure when you do not cling to your partner, or to something they provide you, but when you are really okay with yourself, and they with themselves, and you both just love each other for some ineffable reason, utterly and completely as you are. They will, inevitably, provide wonderful things, like safety, and comfort, and care, but you do not love them because they provide these things!!! Jealousy thrives on a belief that love is a thing that exists outside of you, a commodity to be exchanged and provided to you. The happiness of others becomes a lot easier to cope with, and appreciate, when you realize that love lies within you too, and always has.
2. Internalizing "there is the perception of infinity, rather than reality of it"
I do not like feeling bad. I feel bad very often. Badness can manifest in a million different ways: as a steadfast belief that I am a failure, a ceaseless stream of self-critical thoughts, a barrage of worries that I will never find love and be forever alone. It can also manifest in less legible, bodily ways: an intense tightness in the chest, a racing heartbeat that refuses to end, a restlessness in the arms that surfaces an urge to have them amputated.
Bad feelings are made worse by the belief that they are infinite. Even if I have ample evidence of my bad feelings eventually subsiding, when in them, I continuously do not believe that they will end. Buddhists like to talk about impermanence, but I prefer a phrase a wise person once shared with me: "There is the perception of infinity, rather than the reality of it." This stuck with me, and I try to tell myself this each time I am going through a bad feeling.
3. Not Flinching Away
Bad feelings also tend to pass more quickly if you actually feel them.
"Bad feelings" often instinctively feel so bad that you subconsciously find a million ways to distract yourself from actually feeling them: you spend three hours of your precious life on YouTube Shorts, lose 200 ELO on chess.com, make plans to move countries - all rather than actually sitting and feeling the feeling you do not want to feel. I have spent years avoiding feelings. Most humans have. However, the pain of actually sitting with the thing you are avoiding is often far less painful than the suffering that emerges from avoiding it. So, feel your feelings.
I recently learned that things like overthinking, rumination, and regret are all forms of avoidance of a feeling. When going through a heartbreak and regretting a pivotal decision you made, spending days imagining every alternate scenario â what if I had done this, or this, then maybe we would still be together â is really torture. Unfortunately, you cannot change the past, and the time spent latching onto reimaginations of the past only extends your suffering.
I imagine that when rethinking these scenarios, if you pay close attention, your body will be in pain. You will probably cry. And rather than continuing to imagine the what-ifs, you can just sit with the pain. I think it is fine to engage in the what-ifs insofar as you notice them quickly enough, recognize the pain they engender, and then focus on the pain rather than seeing through the what-ifs or dwelling on them.
For illustration: when I feel a swell of jealous rage coming online, I will usually start crying and screaming and then quickly find as many ways as possible to avoid thinking about the thing that is causing me pain. But what you can also do (in addition to crying and screaming, which I think is healthy and necessary) is: (a) sit with the thoughts causing you pain - for example, perhaps you are picturing your ex falling in love with someone else. Keep picturing it! Picture every version of it! It will feel terrible, but eventually, you run out of material. And (b) observe the physical sensations of pain arising in your body, wherever they may be (for me, this is usually in the heart area). It especially helps if you observe the sensations from a god-like perspective, treating your body as a scientific object of study. Often, when you actually sit with the feelings this way, you will notice two things: (i) much of the "badness" is merely a perception, and can also be viewed as a blob of sensation-particles, and (ii) this blob of sensation-particles will often start moving around in the body. When the sensations are done moving around in your body, you have done something called "processing an emotion." You basically need to keep doing this over and over and over again, until one day you wake up and no longer really feel triggered by this thing that once caused you terrible pain.
- Not knowing / accepting uncertainty / nuance
Sometimes the things u need to sit with / not flinch away from, is not knowing. i have very confusing bodily intutions, and lots of doubt, about pracitcally everything - and i chase relentelssly for answers, but the process of chasing creates this terrible war between th emind and body, and leaves me usually in a prolonged state of panic.
4. Broadcasting less misery
I was born to feel things deeply. People tell me this is a beautiful gift, because I am in tune with what is real. For most of my life, however, Iâve felt this to be a curse, because this gift has mostly manifested in frequent and horrific mood swings, panic spirals, manic episodes, and depressive bouts. When I see people's annual mood tracker data showing their average mood was an 8+ and they only had two days that reached as low as a 4, I curse the cosmic jesters that gave rise to temperamental genetic variation. 1s and 2s are commonplace for me, and the few months that reach an average mood of 7 tend to be outliers.
When I am sad, I find it helpful to believe that my sadness is somehow worse, or more profound, than other people's - because this gives meaning to my pain, thereby justifying my suffering. I often delight in people telling me, "wow, it must be hard to feel as much as you do", or "I can't imagine having gone through xyz". And I think that this drive to win at the game of sadness has inadvertently led me to wanting other people to feel bad for me. Perhaps over time, pity has come to feel similar to, if not indistinguishable from, care. The problem with this is, if your body starts to believe that the only way to access care is through pity, it will decide that a stasis of sadness and misery is a suitable strategy for being. However, the temporary care provided by pity is no match for the boundless care that you can provide yourself once you do away with all your self-loathing. People feeling happy for your genuine happiness is much better than people feeling pity for your genuine sadness.
And so, while I do believe that much of how I feel is just a fact of life and womanhood and genetics, much of it is self-reinforcing, too. I am trying, therefore, to complain a bit less; to seek less reassurance from the outside world; and to accept myself as I am, including the inevitable sadness.
Something re - the manifestation girlies are onto something, beleiving in optimisim, however hard to do, will result in a more optimistic life - i do believe. pessimism is a hyperstiioning force, your body sits in it long enough, it will orient towards pessimism endlessley.
5. Believing in Myself
For most of my life, I have relied on other people believing in me in order to take any form of meaningful action in the world, because my own bouts of self-belief never lasted long enough. By 'believing in yourself,' I mean many things, including believing that you have fundamental worth as a human being, that you are capable of doing the things you have evidence of being capable ofâand probably far beyondâthat you have the capacity to make decisions without input from the external world, and that you can make it through hard times, and even harder times too.
Perhaps most importantly, I think believing in yourself also means believing in your delusions. I use the word delusion to gesture towards those nagging ideas that your soul yearns to see through - that by societal standards may seem a bit odd, but are the things you really want. The things that light you up, the things you fantasize about, the things that consume you into the abyss. I basically think you should try to do these things at all costs. And they very well might require a delusional amount of self-belief.
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The process of writing this blog post appears to have been surprisingly cathartic. In the days after, a strange feeling of robustness emerged within me. I went about my days, noticing all the triggers that usually would have set me off, yet felt somewhat impenetrable to them. I questioned whether I might be dissociating, decided it did not matter, and meditated on the remarkability of the human body to rewire itself and withstand great suffering.
***
And then, shortly after writing the above, I felt terrible again. I read each lesson I had so recently ascended to, and found that collectively, they meant nothing at all. And so it goes. The trees still stand, and one day I will too.