Dumpster-Dancer

I heard the above lament from: a healthy, very fine person; a successful parent, well loved spouse, popular on Facebook, homeowner, and business owner: possessor of; multiple vehicles, a smart phone, hot and cold running water, space heating and cooling, indoor cooking, ample clothing, travel, health care, and pretty much everything kings of old would have killed to have. The lament goes on to assert that a misinterpretation of scripture led to undesired emotional state.

It's a common lament. Why do I feel so shitty? Shouldn't I be happy? Aren't we all supposed to feel good?

I call bullshit on the whole thought process. Who says we are supposed to feel good and feel good about ourselves all the time?

People who want something from us, that's who. In the old days it was the religious institutions. “Just follow our rules and give us 10% of your money, and we promise that you will be happy in the next life, if not this one.” Things have changed a bit today. Religion no longer has quite the same hold on us, but we are inundated all day long with sales pitches that if we just buy this product, or that self-improvement workshop everything will be fine in our lives.

They tell us that joy and happiness are our normal state of being and that if we don't feel that way, something is wrong with us that they can fix. (Don't even get me started on ADHD meds, anti-depressants, opiates and all the other stuff the pharmaceutical industry profits from in their quest to fill our desire to feel good and not hurt.)

The lament says “lost and broken, full of shame and fear.” Think about it. The only people who actually don't feel those things are psychopaths and maybe some sociopaths. For the rest of us, if we're honest with ourselves, we look to yesterday and feel shame for what we could have done better. We look to the future and feel fear of the unknown. We think of what we wish we could do and we feel lost. We imagine what we could be if we were perfect and then we feel broken . . . and then we pick ourselves up. Depending on our personalities, we either blame someone else for all those emotions and feel bitter and angry, or we just get to work on tomorrow, or we self-sooth with our drug or distraction of choice, or whatever, in some combination.

That's just life. Some of us probably set higher standards for ourselves than others, so maybe we feel those things more acutely, but every mentally healthy person feels some negative emotions of some sort.

Should we beat ourselves up for feeling bad in addition to just feeling bad? That's like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer to punish yourself for hitting your finger with a hammer (sorry, I'll be nursing a missing nail for the next six months, so every “v,f,r,t,g, and b” in this essay reminds me how stupid I was with the hammer last week). We don't need to ask why we feel lost, broken, and full of shame and fear. I don't need to punish myself for splatting my finger with a hammer.

But, I probably should realize that if I never want to splat a finger, I should not pick up a hammer. I know I can avoid the pain . . . but then I'm less useful.

So yeah, I'm going to pick that hammer back up. Sooner or later it's going to bite me again. But I'd rather drive nails and hurt than sit in the shelter of a house someone else got hurt to build. And I'm going to keep dreaming the dreams and holding the high standards for myself that make me feel shitty when I can't meet my own expectations.