‘Are We Really Okay?’

“It’s one thing to be sad about something that, if you expressed out loud, would be called selfish and unreasonable. But feelings don’t work that way. There’s nothing you can do about the way you’re feeling and you’d rather keep it all to yourself and be miserable than put it out there and be done with all of it. For the last few weeks, I felt as though it would be better to keep everything that I was going through to myself because I was afraid I would come off as a terribly selfish person if I voiced my thoughts out loud. I tried to shut everybody out and decided that it wasn’t a good idea to let my friends know of it. I’m sure that there are a million ways to sublimate and get rid of all the negative emotions that you’re going through right now, and I’m sure they help in their own ways. But there’s nothing that can be done about it unless you’re willing to put it out there in the open and be vocal about it. It might not turn as badly as you think, to be honest. It might even make you feel a whole lot better once it’s out there. My best friend had to remind me, yesterday, that whatever I was going through is very valid. I think that sometimes we are so caught up in trying to remind everybody else of how valid their feelings are, we kind of push our own feelings aside because we think we can deal with them later on (spoiler alert: that box will never be opened again unless someone cracks it open for you). I read somewhere that it is much easier to deal with problems that aren’t your own, and it surprises me how true that is. Sometimes, we just need to remind each other that the worst things we think about ourselves are not true at all. They’re just the darkest parts of ourselves trying to back us up into a corner. It’s never easy to get over something that keeps reminding you that you’re not good enough, but you really are. We forget that about ourselves so easily. We let things slide and say things like ‘It’s alright,’ or ‘I’ll be okay’, but all we really want to do is let it all out. Of course you should do that in your own time, whenever you feel the most comfortable talking about it, but whatever you do, don’t keep it all to yourself. You’re allowed to go through all the highs and the lows as long as you’re not hurting yourself beyond repair in the process. We just need to remind ourselves that it is okay and very valid of us even when we aren’t okay. No life is perfect, not by a long shot. It just takes a long time to figure things like that out. I wish you don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”

Featured Image by J Lee on Unsplash