Death by a Thousand Should’s

Feeling good is overrated. You can trust me, I’m qualified to say that. We often mistake the cause for the effect. The cause meaning why something happened. The effect meaning what happened. Are the effects of feeling good actually caused by feeling good? Or do we just believe that’s the case? I’m confused.

Expecting to feel good all the time is expecting too much from yourself. Yet good is our north star, our gravitational center. Is feeling good normal? Or is it good? Or is normal good? It’s gotten so confusing that we say we feel bad by saying we don’t feel good. Is good simply the absence of bad?

We’re so convinced that we should feel good all the time that we believe we deserve to feel good all the time. Who promised you this?

One morning, about two years ago, I woke up and it hit me, “I have cancer why am I expecting to feel good?”. I realized at that moment I had been waking up each morning of my life expecting to feel good.

Dr. Marc Brackett defines anger as perceived injustice and disappointment as unmet expectations. Upon waking up, I’d be pissed off because I believed that I deserved to feel good and didn’t. And I’d be disappointed because my expectation of feeling good wasn’t being met. Starting out the day with two feet in the hole, nice.

Dr. Brackett also says that emotions, at their core, are signals to either approach or avoid. So when you’re day starts off with strong avoidance signals, it can be such a struggle to even get back to neutral. I’ve learned to try as best I can to evaluate how I feel on a daily basis from a place of how I actually feel and not how I think I should feel. It takes less effort to just feel than it does to should feel.

What’s so good about feeling good? And what’s so bad about feeling bad?

When I try to answer these question my mind goes immediately to all the things I’m able to do when I feel good, and to the lack of things I’m able to do when I feel bad. Here’s where the stories you tell yourself exist. Think troll under the bridge. I’ll call my troll Mr. Good.

Mr. Good told the story that when I feel good I’m productive, nice, I have a sense of humor, I’m extremely capable. But when I feel bad I’m unproductive, unable, grumpy and I lay on the couch all day. These were the effects, but what’s the cause?

Mr. Good doesn’t really like when you find out about him, so he tries to scare you away. Classic deflection. Here’s two examples.

There were days in my first year of living with cancer where Mr. Good was so scared his bullshit story would be found out. So he got real aggressive and said things like “you took your pill, there’s no point in trying to do anything else today because it won’t be good enough and it’ll just make you feel like shit tomorrow.” I believed him sometimes.

Then there are some days when I know I feel like shit and try to make myself feel good. Mr. Good would convince me that was what I needed to do by saying things like “it’s not that bad, just push through, some have it way worse”. There’s nothing wrong with a nice pep talk. But active denial low key takes a ton of energy. And then when my body would eventually crash he’d change his story and be like “why’d you do all that, you knew you felt like crap?”. Damn, Mr. Good you versatile.

Mr. Good has a vested interest in making me believe that the cause of me doing good was me feeling good. The more I understood Mr. Good the more his story started to unravel. It’s been slowly revealed to me that the effects I so coveted from feeling good are also available when I feel bad.

The cause is not us feeling good. The cause is we are of good.

 

There’s so much identity, self-worth, and belief about oneself that has to be reckoned with. It’s confusing, but in this way feeling bad is actually a form of progress. Because it means that the part of you that’s willing to feel the full brunt of something, even if it’s bad, is larger than the part of you that wants to hide in your belief that you always need to feel good. Feeling badness in full is the cost required to rewrite the story.

As the gatekeeper to this story line, Mr. Good is not ever going to go away. Get that in your head now. Bargain with him, poke holes in his story, offer him things. Start questioning him. “Who is it that wants to feel good all the time? Do I actually need to feel good? Why? These gatekeepers are the ones who hold our limiting expectations, but they’re also the ones who can offer us a wider sense of being.

If you’re often thinking “I just want things to go back to normal”, know that part of you is dying. And those are its last gasps. We have a hard time talking about death. So we come up with cute phrases like “the new normal”.

Part of you has to die in order for you to make change. But that part of you doesn’t die when circumstances do. It lingers around and takes longer than you’d think. Because that’s another trick of Mr. Good. He convinces you that you can just get rid of him, but that allows him to further entrench himself in disconnectedness.

This mismatch of wanting old ways back versus adjusting to new ones is precisely what makes the necessary changes evident to us. Part of you is always in death and part of you is always being born again. That’s not just exclusive to you, though. That’s life baby.

When I’m feeling particularly testy I get all riled up and think something like “the new normal is just another way of saying your life is gonna suck now”. In the cancer pamphlets they give out upon diagnosis there’s usually some cliche line like “living with the new normal of cancer can be even more meaningful than before”. And of course that’s true. But it’s delivered in such a way that confuses. The pamphlets don’t really tell you why.

It’s more meaningful because it sucks, not because it doesn’t. It sucks completely in a lot of old ways but that is precisely what creates the new ways in which it doesn’t. The new normal may not be good, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be better.

I don’t really feel like putting a bow on this and wrapping it up all neat and tidy. This isn’t like that. It feels profoundly obvious to say this but you won’t feel good all the time. Maybe you believe that you should. Maybe that makes you feel worse. Maybe that’s exactly the point. And maybe, just maybe, stop mistaking normal for really fucking good. Peace.