Give yourself a break
When I was a child my mother never told me not to cry. Every time I ran to her, bitterly crying after yet another frustration in life, she would just look at me from her towering height and sigh “life is a valley of tears”. Needless to say that it was not much of a consolation back then, but with time I have come to appreciate this ancient piece of wisdom.
I guess this is because it stands in stark contrast with the happiness-centered society I live in. Believing that life is suffering takes the same amount of effort than believing that life has to be awesome. But to me, both are a lie. The truth is, nobody knows. Sometimes life is great, sometimes…you know.
In a happiness-centered society we avoid talking about what is not right in our lives, because we think our life is the result of our actions. If we are where we are, we must have done something wrong along the way. If we feel the way we do, we have to be able to get our shit together. In a world where one is supposed to be the master of one’s own destiny, unhappiness becomes a personal failure, and who wants to talk about failure?
But shit happens. Life happens. Other people happen and finally, we are human. As the saying goes: errare humanum est, to err is human. This is why I advocate for more humanity, a world where there is a space for imperfection, a world where we are more forgiving with our flaws and the flaws of others.
Maybe we would be better off if we gave more space to so called “negative” feelings. Most people have no patience and little empathy for them, behaving as if uncomfortable feelings were contagious, not a part of life. At best, we brush over them. At worst, we look the other way, because it’s not fun.
The truth is everyone struggles, but we all make an effort to pretend it’s ok. This is why some people become impatient, even angry when confronted with someone who is sad and takes time to get over it: because they too have a ton of problems they don’t talk about. Unpleasant feelings like sadness, anger and loneliness have become socially inadequate.
Paradoxically, a world where everyone claims to be happier than they are is not a happy world. The fear that sad people will drag happy people down does not materialize. Actually, the reverse happens: the illusion of people with perfect lives drags the imperfect human beings we all are down.
So maybe the time has come to do the opposite of what we do on social media, sharing not only the great but also the ugly, because only when our flaws become other people’s, only when we are not alone, we can start taking ourselves less seriously and laughing at how human, little and flawed we all are.
