Why You Need Your Negative Emotions to Thrive

If I had a list of feelings I’d rather skip, regret would be on there. (Despair, loneliness, rage: these could all make the list, too. I’d more or less like to have all the warm-fuzzy feelings and none of the ones that make you cry.)

I’m not alone in this.

Regret is like a spider with hairy legs, or grape-flavored soda. You wish it would go away, sure, but more than that—

You wish it just didn’t exist.

At a book signing not long ago, I heard Dave Bruno talk about his year-long project to live with just a hundred belongings.

Dave wrote a book called “The 100 Thing Challenge,” so people ask him all kinds of questions about how many pairs of socks he owns and whether individual books count as “things,” and what to do with the giant pile of Frisbees the dog keeps bringing home. (I might be imagining the one about the Frisbees.)

Listening to those questions, you’d think we all want to try out new paths that might bring us joy—but we want to know the exact right way to do it first. We don’t want to make mistakes.

We don’t want to learn the hard way.

And yet… no one else knows what’s ahead on your path. If you want to go anywhere at all, you’re going to have to face the fear that says, what if I try, and this doesn’t go the way I hope it will? What if I regret this decision?

When someone asked if there was anything he wished he hadn’t gotten rid of, Dave said something kind of surprising.

He said yes, there are things he regrets giving away—and that’s okay.

That’s what he said, that it’s okay to feel that regret. You don’t always have to avoid it. It’s just a feeling.

It’s okay to feel regret.

It’s okay to wish things had gone differently.

It’s okay to feel your feelings.

What if, instead of trying to skip half our feelings, we tried to listen to them all? Those feelings have things to teach us. They’re all in our toolbox for a reason. They all color our experience, and nobody wants to color with half a box of crayons.

A full human experience includes a full range of emotion.

We can listen and ask questions:

What’s going on here? What is this feeling trying to tell me? Am I listening? Are there changes I should make?

Instead of getting stuck trying to make perfect choices that we’ll never regret, we can do the best we can with what we know.

Because even if things don’t work out, you aren’t going to sit with that feeling forever.

Every living thing grows and changes—out of despair, and into acceptance. Our of regret, and into understanding.

Out of mourning, into dancing.

And then, if you are me, out of dancing and probably into a sprained ankle, and maybe some mild regret. But that will pass, too.

And I can practice listening to it in the meantime.