You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You

by Mike McHargue

You’ve been taught to think of yourself as an individual, but we’re learning that’s not the most accurate way to view a person. You are a vast collection of brain cells and bacteria, a teeming ocean of life checking Instagram for likes. Though you may think of yourself as the conductor of the orchestra that is your life, you are more like the orchestra itself, a myriad of musicians coming together to create a single symphony.

You are a miracle because 86 billion neurons in your brain form into thousands of structures and networks, built from a map created over billions of years to understand the world you live in.

You are here. You are alive. You have survived the challenges of life, and each part of you—even the parts you don’t like or appreciate—has played a role in your continued existence. There isn’t a piece of you that hasn’t been fearfully and wonderfully made, tested by the unforgiving process of natural selection.

Finally, punishment and prohibition are really ineffective. They train people to hide their behaviors, not to alter them. Social acceptance and support, on the other hand, are effective counterpressures to the anxiety that fuels our compulsions. This is why it’s far more effective to offer education, open conversation, and professional support when people are struggling with unregulated behavioral patterns. Openness in community is a salve that helps us heal.

Acceptance beats shame every time.

How we say something matters as much as what we say, because our automatic nervous system is listening and responding to tone long before our thinking brains get the message.

I believe that when you learn to appreciate all your feelings, to accept them as a vital part of you, you’ll begin a journey that helps you escape the cycle of spinning around the triangle of core, inhibiting, and defensive affects, and instead acquaint yourself with the clarity and calm that come from riding an emotional wave all the way through.

In a war to control human thought and behavior, the machines are winning. The cost is both in quality of life and in life and death. We’re more lonely, anxious, and outraged than ever, and we’re losing the people we love to death by suicide, on one hand, and distraction-driven road fatalities, on the other.

In this way, “niceness,” which is to say, distancing ourselves from uncomfortable feelings, becomes a veneer that masks the cruel and inequitable foundation of our civilization. It encourages us to police any behaviors and feelings that provoke discomfort, and in doing so, we oppress and disenfranchise people, sometimes without intending to do so.

Kindness, on the other hand, means taking ownership of your agency in a way that fosters intimacy.

I hope you learn to see the miracle, to claim your rightful place among wonders like supernovas and photosynthesis. But I also hope you understand that the things that drive you crazy about yourself are there to protect you, to help you, and to drive you toward the change you’ll need to make it through the next rough patch in your life.