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March 16 - March 27, 2023
I never realized how attached I was to control until I started to lose so much of it.
“What you pay me to do is to be helpful. Rumination without reflection isn’t helpful.”
The absence of cheerfulness is not a disorder.
just because the experience you’re having isn’t clinically recognized as an illness, that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. Your work is to examine the degree to which your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and interpersonal relationships are disrupting or enhancing your quality of life. Therapists, books, and personal-development stuff can offer you a supportive framework as you make those considerations, but ultimately you’re the only one who knows what it’s like to be you.
Nobody is inoculated from “mental health conditions”; mental health conditions are human conditions. We all have the capacity to dip, dive, coast, float, and soar. We’re all up and down at different times, in different ways, and for different reasons. This is all fine and as it should be; it’s also exactly why we need one another.
You can be present and feel tired. You can be present and feel heartbroken. You can be present and not feel ready.
the experience of winning forces you to realize that there are no substitutes for self-worth or presence.
In practice, enacting power looks like reminding yourself that you’re already whole and perfect. Enacting power looks like maintaining self-awareness by taking time to check in with yourself and ask how you’re feeling, as you would a friend (in chapter 8, you’ll learn why you should do this in the third person). Enacting power looks like freely giving yourself access to goodness instead of waiting to see how things turn out before deciding how much goodness you deserve. Enacting power looks like putting boundaries around the people and things that make it harder for you to believe in your
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Marissa’s goal, like the goal so many of us fall prey to, was not to process what happened but to learn how to control her feelings about what happened. Preconceived notions about what it means to be “officially healed” loiter around in our minds and hearts. These imaginings of what we think our healing is supposed to look like are always wrong. You have no idea what form your healing will take.
Feeling better wasn’t what decreased Simone’s suicidal ideation. What decreased it was understanding that should her intense state of pain return, she was not helpless against it.
Connection will hold you over when nothing else can.
We’ve adopted this sanitized, “healthy people can bypass pain” view of emotional well-being (otherwise known as toxic positivity) because we prioritize analytical intelligence over emotional intelligence.
we are all in enough pain already. We don’t need to invent more pain for ourselves through self-punishment.
Growth looks like two steps forward and five steps back sometimes. Healing isn’t linear or iterative. Healing is a process, not an event, and in the process of healing and learning, repetition is important. Different iterations of the same lesson theme show up repeatedly, and each time they do, you understand the lesson a little more completely. That’s how learning is supposed to work.
What does work is to engage the invisible tedium of moving away from who you’re not and moving towards who you are. It’s not a glamorous process, you won’t get any credit for it, there are no instructions, and there’s no finish line because it never ends. Have fun.
We spend our lives confronted by two rotating fears: I’ll never get what I want. I’ll lose what I have.
If you can’t let go of your attachment to the outcome, you will spend your life trading one fear for the other.
You worked hard to get here. You took on the gritty task of being honest about what wasn’t working for you. You extinguished your tolerance for so much nonsense you used to happily wait in line for. There were so many trials that you had to overcome for you to arrive at the you who is here now reading this book. Lessons that you’ve mastered so well you’ve forgotten they were ever a struggle. Acknowledging the process requires you to give credit to yourself for the work you’ve done to get to where you are now.
There’s no card at the store for the personal goals that you’re investing so much of yourself into. When you lead a self-defined life, you have to be the one to put a stake in the ground and say: “This is important. This is a big deal!”
This is how adaptive perfectionists live—inviting joy, connection, support, and gratitude into their lives during the process, not just after the win.
If we only celebrated what we could be certain of, that which we were sure we could never lose, we would never have cause for celebration. There is no such thing as officially having anything.
You can’t control grief by subtracting joy from your life. You can’t control grief, period.
“Doing the work” is not solely about learning how to recognize and speak our sadness, our anger, and our angst. Doing the work is just as much (if not more so) about learning how to recognize, speak, and celebrate our joy.
The projects and relationships you’re working on are important not because they’ll lead to a desirable outcome but because you have deemed them worthy of your precious time and energy. This is what it means to lead a self-defined life—it’s understanding that whatever you choose to value is what’s valuable and whatever you decide to care about is what’s worth caring about.
Patience is not passivity.
Knowing that you need to do something and knowing what exactly it is that you need to do are two different things; the knowledge of both strikes us simultaneously only in the luckiest of circumstances.
Sustainable strategies for growth are marked by subtlety, not aggression. Incrementalism—the idea that change faithfully made in small degrees adds up to significant progress—is an example of a subtle approach to growth. Subtlety is powerful.
It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things.
We all know what to do to live better; it’s not a big mystery: go to bed earlier, eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, hang out with kind people instead of terrible people, take the stairs. We could all dramatically change our lives if we “just” started doing a few simple things regularly, and we know that. And we still don’t do them. The point that doing the right thing is so simple and yet so hard is a universal experience.
Wellness is not about figuring out how to get rid of your weaknesses; it’s about accepting your weaknesses so you can deploy your energy into maximizing your strengths.
What are you easily getting right? What is the skill set involved? What would happen if you applied that skill set to other areas of your life?
It feels great to be productive when what you’re doing is aligned with your values.
Anything you do to protect, save, restore, and build your energy is productive.
“What does closure look like for you?” Every answer is different, but a common thread binds them: the desire for closure reveals a fantasy.
Closure is a fantasy wherein you can bookend remnant confusion with bricks of logic so that everything makes perfect sense. Closure is a fantasy wherein all pain can be justified and all suffering exists for a righteous reason.
Closure is also about the fantasy that you can no longer be penetrated by the pain, that you are officially done having to deal with something, that your proverbial therapy paperwork is red-stamped HEALED.
When we say we want closure, what we really want is control.
You can’t apply analytics to grief. You can’t perfectly understand grief.
Before I started practicing, I believed that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe that anymore. Sometimes, not only is there not a perfect answer for “why,” there’s no answer at all.
Power in grief involves allowing diametric states to coexist. Our desires and experiences as human beings are regularly diametric. We want freedom and security, indulgence and moderation, spontaneity and routine. We want everyone to be treated equally, and we also want status. We want to connect deeply to those around us, and we also want everyone to leave us alone so we can look at dumb shit on our phones in peace.
Our relational experiences can also be diametric. A parent can both neglect us and love us. A colleague can be met with both appreciation and distrust. We can feel so relieved upon leaving a relationship and miss the person still. These aren’t contradictory
It’s a shared myth floating around in our collective bobbleheads—that healing means you streamlined your internal world so that everything is clean and explainable.
We are coming dangerously close to operating under the notion that being upset for more than a few hours means you’re unhealthy. It’s somewhat surprising to me that we haven’t turned crying into a disorder.
We put such pressure on ourselves to know exactly who we are and what we want in every moment; it’s okay for some things to be fuzzy. People who identify with having “so many issues” are often just people who don’t have immediate or perfect closure on the ever-evolving experience of being human.
You think closure will be the thing that takes away your hurt, but it’s self-compassion that will prove to be your salve. Give yourself permission to hurt.
Restoration is a two-phase process. You empty yourself out, you fill yourself back up.
If you only decompress, you end up feeling lazy, vaguely gross, and empty inside. If you only actively relax, you end up feeling like you’re trying hard to restore but your efforts just end up causing you more stress.
Needing validation is not a reflection of insecurity; it’s a central mode of connection. Healthy people need validation. Everyone needs validation. It’s okay that you need validation; what’s not okay is for you to employ external validation as a primary source of self-worth.
Regressing into negative patterns still happens when you’re restored, but it happens less often, you’re conscious of it faster, and you have the energy to make swift and meaningful repair attempts.
Restoring yourself doesn’t inoculate you from making mistakes. Nothing inoculates anyone from making mistakes. Old mistakes, new mistakes, some creatively hybrid version of old and new mistakes—no matter how adaptive or healthy we become, we will all continue to make mistakes.
