12 May Quit being OKAY…
I have been thinking about common messages that I talk about in session. A huge one is “quit being okay.” People try to put on a brave face, keep it together,or struggle through when facing difficult circumstances. While its admirable and at times necessary, this is a survival mode. It is not what getting better looks like.
Culturally, we hold a little bit of a distorted value. We admire seeing someone who struggling through something and doing it gracefully. We say “she is really doing well with it” or even “she is having such faith in view of this trial”. If our life is in a mess, we should be in a mess. Not continuously hysterical or non-functioning but sad, angry, hurt, lonely. There are certainly times in our life, we must feel these negative feelings. To not feel these is to be unhealthy. (Please note the vast difference between feeling something and acting on the feeling.) You won’t stay in this place forever. If you don’t allow yourself to ever stop here, you will keep carrying these feelings with you.
We will all have times during which we are not okay and we shouldn’t try to be. Yes, in front of our kids, when around acquaintances or on the job, we might need to keep it together. The road to being better always goes through being worse first. Life gets harder so that we rise to the challenge, so that we reach out for help, so that we question ourselves and so that we are shaken enough to let go of good/bad things to reach for something better. If you are currently overwhelmed, give yourself permission to not be okay. To cry. To think irrationally. To be angry. To have no motivation. It is through this season, you come through the other side to something better.
Quit being okay, so you can be better.
-Jennifer
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