“Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people’s blow-dried outsides.”
Mary Karr
There was a time when getting a lobotomy was seen as a miracle treatment for mental health conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. Invented by a neurologist named Egas Moniz in 1935, it was intended to reduce anxiety, and agitation. The procedure involved drilling holes in a patient’s head in order to sever the link between the frontal lobe and other regions in the brain.
In a few years, lobotomies became a mainstream practice among expert psychiatrists. And in a few more years, Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
In a sense, the lobotomies did work for many of the patients. They did feel less anxious, and they did feel less agitated. But over time, there were increasing reports of the unintended side effect, in that the patients became vegetables. They were able to feel little to no emotion. They became apathetic, catatonic and unengaged with the world around them. Some even died.
Ironically, of all places in the world, the Soviet Union was the first to ban lobotomies, with the claim that lobotomies were “contrary to the principles of humanity.” As if responding to an unexpected wake-up call in the dead of night, other countries soon followed suit. Because, well, as author Mark Manson put it best, “When Joseph Stalin is lecturing you about ethics and human decency, you know you’ve fucked up.”
I’m telling you this story, because I know what it’s like to feel trapped in your own thoughts, to wish like you felt nothing. It’s a dark, lonesome place, that at times you genuinely fear that you would and could never get out of.
But there’s an inevitable duality to this life. We could numb or silence the part of ourselves that feels pain and suffering, but that would also mean doing the same for the other part of ourselves that feels beautiful things.
I believe this struggle — or in other words, our inability to sit with our difficult emotions — is why many of us are miserable. And this struggle stems from our tendency to overvalue desirable feelings and emotions, such as happiness. Because by constantly desiring happiness, we would be constantly reminded of what we don’t have.
We tend to think that if we’re not feeling happy, then something’s wrong. And so, we feel bad about the fact that we’re not happy. Then we feel bad about feeling bad. And the vicious cycle continues.
One of the most important things I learned from therapy is that there is more to life than being happy all the time. There are no good or bad emotions, because emotions simply are. You’re not your emotions — you’re not less than a decent human being because you’re not feeling happy. Feeling sad doesn’t make you a sad sap. Likewise, feeling happy doesn’t make you an altogether happy and healthy person.
Feelings come and go, too. How you feel today could be different from how you might feel tomorrow. Even how you feel at the moment could change throughout the day.
If all you care about is feeling happy, then you’re screwed. Because realistically, no one can be happy all the time. And nothing in the world could make you happy all the time either.
Unsurprisingly, social media plays a massive role in our overvaluing of happiness. It seems like everybody is kicking ass, and everybody is living their best life. But really, it’s just the classic narrative fallacy at play — everything’s a story, with all the ugly details conveniently left out. You don’t see anyone posting about the uninteresting parts of their life when they’re feeling depressed, and lying in bed all day with giant tubs of ice cream.
Life just sucks sometimes, and that’s okay. And that’s the key here — to just allow yourself to feel whatever you’re feeling.
Feelings don’t have to be anything. You can simply acknowledge how you feel without ruminating, without getting sucked into a guilt vortex. You can just feel. You can tell yourself that it’s okay to feel what you feel. And without you even having to try, you’d feel differently in time — because feelings come and go, right?
Among other things, this is the discipline you get to instill in yourself by meditating, which is really just the practice of acknowledging and letting things come and go in your mind.
All of this may seem counterintuitive, but that’s the whole paradox of our internal state. To quote Mark Manson again, from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, “The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”
As he explains, “When it comes to our internal states, everything is backwards. If you want to be happy, then don’t chase happiness. If you want to stop being sad, let yourself be sad.”
Avoidance and distraction do nothing to help you get better, and more likely than not, only make your situation worse.
Especially when it comes to our feelings, the best way to be at peace with them is to make peace with them — to let go of them by embracing them.
Izzat Zailan 