I forgot that it’s okay to not be okay

We often hear that there’s nothing wrong with not feeling happy 24/7 but how many of us have this thought that it’s completely valid to feel this way when we are at our low? In these times you forget, simple as that. You forget what you were saying to yourself earlier when you didn’t feel much need for this to be true.

When I was a few years younger, I stumbled upon creators that focused on mental health awareness. It was like a breath of fresh air after all the edited social media posts and glamorous Youtube videos that make you feel shit because you didn’t do a workout in the morning before having an avocado toast for breakfast but you got up late and had a simple bread with cheese. Quotes from these inspirational videos wrote themselves into my mind and I was often saying how helpful they’d be when I feel shitty. And often enough they were, but lately, it seems like I’ve forgotten to actually listen and try to remember.

Coming back to social media and the toxicity of it, I realised accounts are not a genuine image of the people behind them. They are presenting themselves in a way that is so far away from reality. And everybody wants to share the happy moments where they look good and feel even better. What we often don’t realise, including myself, is that this isn’t the full 100% of their life. This is just what they present with pride. This is just like when you bake a cake and you give the nice pieces to others while keeping the worse-looking ones to yourself. You keep the bad moments for yourself.

So, why do we feel obligated to lead a life that’s always pure positivity without one bad feeling? Why do we feel like we need to live a lie just to feel ‘normal’? When asked ‘Are you alright?’, why do we reply with yes when the real answer’s not quite? And most importantly, why do we feel guilty for feeling sad?

That’s a lot of ‘whys’ there and no definitive answer. Although, let’s just focus on the last question, the question of a guilty conscience. Like I said before, we feel like we need to present ourselves in the best light possible and feel it too, which leads us to question our sanity when we don’t have one of those lucky days. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ is a question I’ve asked myself too often, if I’m being honest.

We have these falsely planted expectations to be happy every hour of every day. And this is the source – expectations. We expect our emotions to work in a logical sense and make sense all the time and the truth is, sometimes they don’t. This sends us to destination number two, questioning whether there’s something ‘wrong’ with us. This overthinking process can have many outcomes, none of them good. One more specifically is guilt. We feel guilty because we have a good life, we have good people around us, and yet, we don’t feel content.

So, I would only like to clarify sometimes there’s no answer to why we feel like shit. And sometimes it just goes away the next day or week. And most of the time, it really is okay, even if we doubt it.