That feeling you can’t shake off.
Something shifted. And now you’re living in the gap between who you were and who you’re becoming. Not quite here but not there yet.
It’s uncomfortable in here.
That feeling of being unsettled — not quite rooted yet in the new job, the new city, the new version of yourself.
The quiet grief of an injury that benches you from the thing that kept you sane and smiling.
The particular ache of a relationship that had all the ingredients to be
the one” but still didn’t make it.
The bittersweet weight of leaving a place you loved for something that might be better.
Frustration when you gave everything — and it still wasn’t enough.
Disappointment when someone broke their word.
Sadness that the simple life you once had quietly slipped away the moment you chose more.
These feelings don’t mean something’s wrong with you.
They mean you’re alive.
I was talking to someone recently. The realization of where their life actually is — versus where they thought it would be — had finally landed.
Hard.
She felt sad.
I’m a big believer in reframing. In finding the positive in the negative, the silver lining in the darkest cloud.
And also, I like to say often,
“Life doesn’t owe you sh*t. And the pain that comes with being alive isn’t a bug. It’s part of the deal.”
That’s often the permission we need sometimes to feel the feeling.
Permission to stop fighting what’s “negative” and bad.
To stop trying to logic your way out of it or paste a positive affirmation over it like wallpaper over a crack.
Here’s what most of us get wrong about hard feelings: we treat them like unwanted intruders.
We resist them. Rush them. Suppress them. Try to eliminate them before they can do their work.
The work of showing you something that happened, something that mattered.
Feeling positive all the time isn’t life. It’s performance. It’s like sitting in a cold plunge and pretending you’re not cold. The cold is real. The pain is real. And if you’ve ever done one, you know — the only way through is to stop fighting it.
You breathe. You sit. And eventually, it passes. As the cold plunge does too.
Most of the suffering we carry doesn’t linger because life is unbearably hard all the time. It lingers because we won’t let our feelings finish their job.
A feeling’s job is to bring your attention to something. And when you let it — really let it — it delivers its message and moves on.
When you don’t, it camps out.
So when life hits hard — and it will — try something different.
Sit with that uncomfortable feeling like you’d sit with a friend going through it. Don’t fix. Don’t reframe. Don’t fast-forward.
Just acknowledge it. Let it be for a moment.
Then give it a hug.
And move to the next adventure.
When sadness, frustration, or disappointment shows up — do you have a practice for letting it move through you? Or are you still trying to outrun it, pretending it’s not there?