Compassion Needs Context

Our modern social space would have us believe we need to be positive every waking second of the day, focusing on good news, innovations that can save the planet, new ways to 'conquer the self', yada-yada...but there's a limit to how much acknowledging good things actually helps us. We could take every chance to force optimism like pushing out a constipated shit, but it feels important to instead allow the hard feelings to have their space. To grant them a chance to live without judgment because they are a part of us.

Yes, we can often find benefit taking a rough situation and working to see both sides of the coin, but that's not truly how most of us frame it. Maneuvering this metaphorical coin between our fingers, it's more accurate to say we tend to see the positive side as "reality" and the negative one as fake...like a sign of our flaws and failures. To convince ourselves that only the good side is real will only ever do us harm. After all, if it were true that our negative emotions and outlooks come only from our weakness, how could we ever hope to hold empathy and love for ourselves during the times we're hopeless and lost?

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Casting away the context of suffering - a natural part of every person's life - would inexorably lead to a full denial and intolerance of the self as "wrong", "broken", "shameful", "weak", and every other loathsome adjective our inner oppressive inner slave driver would sear into our flesh, exalting the social media era's classic Instagram or LinkedIn definition of "good" rather than allowing space for us to value what is true.

Life is fucking hard. It is good to admit it. It's healing to say out loud, "I'm feeling *insert negative emotion*," without telling yourself, "I shouldn't be feeling this way..."

What we need is context and compassion. There's always something behind our emotions, and no amount of telling ourselves off will lead us out of the darkness.

If you're depressed today, try this:

"I'm feeling depressed. What in my life/day can help explain where this is coming from, and how can I be kind to myself to get through this?"

Accept your emotion. Let the answers come. Find any small thread and follow it to a place where you can see how you got to where you are now. I promise you, it's not as unreasonable as you might think.