Research shows that a daily practice of gratitude can make you happier but have you had a time in life when “gratitude” felt impossible? Have you ever felt like “staying positive” might be blocking you from feeling what was true for you that day?
What is the line between “being grateful” and pretending things are different than they actually are?
Is it healthy to pretend you feel differently than you actually do?
If you’ve ever wished you felt grateful but instead you felt sad, depressed, anxious, worried, or even despair, this episode is for you. We’ll dive into the nuance of this topic and I’ll share how I am learning (slowly) to move past positivity and find true joy.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on cold It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk about this idea of staying positive when things are hard, and specifically, I want to talk about toxic positivity. I know this is a term that's been on the scene for quite some time, and sometimes I'm kind of late to talk about stuff. I feel like I'm not, like always on the cutting edge of talking about what's happening in popular culture. But there's a reason that I want to talk about it right now, and it's because my personal worldview is evolving significantly as we speak, as all of our worldviews are. But I feel like a lot of what I've been learning has to do with this idea of staying positive, toxic positive, whatever you want to call it. I have been learning so much as it relates to this concept of thinking positive, staying positive, toxic positivity, however you want to name it. I've been going through a lot on this, and I've been learning a lot, and I just wanted to share with you from my perspective in case you might find it helpful or in case you might find that it meets you where you are in your own personal story. So I'll start here that I posted something on Instagram a while back. This was in twenty twenty, kind of like right at the beginning of the pandemic. I don't remember exactly what month it was, but I know that my daughter had not been born yet, so she was born in July of twenty twenty. Pandemic started in March, so sometime between March and July of twenty twenty, I posted something on Instagram that said something like life is too short to be unhappy or something like that. It was from a of I had been in a bad mood all day and I was trying to kind of pull myself out of this bad mood. I had been feeling like emotional and frustrated at the current set of circumstances. We were all in lockdown. I had had a few like big kind of disappointments that had taken place around where I was going to be able to give birth and my doula, and also a couple of work things that had happened, and I was just finding myself feeling pretty down and I was trying to pull myself out of it. Which, to give you some background in history for me, this is behavior for me that was learned from a very young age, and that seemed pretty normal to me. In fact, when I posted that on Instagram, I did not think I was going to get this severe backlash that I got, because usually on my Instagram I post stuff that's not super controversial. I mean, hopefully it's helpful and inspiring, but it's not usually very controversial. I kind of avoid controversial topics. I don't really like arguing in general, alone arguing on the internet. I can enjoy, like a good, happy, positive argument with a friend or family member if there's a lot of trust built in the relationship and I feel safe to do it. But conflict for the sake of conflict is not my temperament. It's not my personality. So I tend to kind of steer away from those topics and tend to be more of an observer when those topics come up in pop culture or when they come up online. So I didn't see this coming that when I posted this, I was going to get like this crazy backlash of people who I think felt a little dismissed by what I had posted. Because we're living in this time of COVID, where, at least in LA at the time, we were in like total lockdown. We were not allowed to be out past a certain time at night. We were on a curfew. We had you know, mask mandates in every public place, including outdoors. We had mask mandates in our neighborhoods, and the trails were closed and the beaches were closed, and people were not able to go to work. You know, most of my friends at the time were either working remotely or if they weren't able to work remotely, we're not working at all. And so we were taking assistance from we meaning me and my friends were taking assistance from the government at the time, taking either unemployment or there were PvP loans. I can't remember if those were quite around yet, but it felt like a pretty dark time at least in LA. You know, I had friends who were hairdressers or who were makeup artists on set, or who worked in entertainment, or who were actors and actresses, and everyone was out of work, and everyone was going like, Okay, when's the next paycheck going to come? And how are we going to navigate this period of time that we're in. And it was a pretty complicated, confusing, and sometimes scary time. Or maybe even now I'm understating it, it was a pretty scary time. I will say I looking back now, I can see how much I was in survival mode and how truly scared that I was, and how much I was blocking myself from feeling how scared I was, because to feel as scared as I actually was felt extremely terrifying. And if you've been around this show for a while, you've heard this part of the story. But during this time, I was, you know, what would it have been like seven or eight months pregnant. My husband had shut down his business, so I was the primary breadwinner. We'd had to pivot in my business because everyone did. It was a weird time, and things were selling differently, and everyone was changing the way that they were operating online and I was having to start to meet with in person clients over zoom, so that was stressful, and I was trying to keep I had five employees at the time. I was trying to keep everyone employed, and it was extremely stressful. And I remember thinking like, Okay, this baby's going to be born and then what then, what am I going to do? So yeah, it was a challenging time, and yet I was doing the thing that I had done for all of my life unconsciously that I didn't realize I was doing, which was trying to pull myself out of this low mood by saying like, life is too short to be unhappy, Like let me find something to be happy about. Let's go get ice cream or you know, let's whatever, like take the dog for a drive or or something like that. Just try to find something to kind of bring myself out of this low mood. I post this on Instagram. I get this really big backlash. I think I deleted the post. I can't even remember now, but I just remember being like, WHOA, I did not see that coming, and feeling a little bit caught off guard and maybe almost like attacked by all these people who were like, that's not really a fair thing to say, given the period of time that we're in, and now looking back, I see this all really differently because I've been in this long season of unraveling those old patterns and habits and learning a new way of being that has a lot more space for just all the different feelings and moods that might come up on any different day, and sees them more like, as my friend Don Miller would say, more like weather patterns. It's like they come in, they leave. We don't have control over them, we don't need to control them. It's sunny today, it's rainy tomorrow. That's just how the weather works. And because of my experiences in the last five years, I've been able to allow myself more space to move through those moods as they come. But back then I didn't have the skill set to do that. I didn't know how to do it. And even in the last five years, I've moved kind of in and out of knowing how to do that, and I have found myself at points latching on to teachers or ideas that take me back to that old, familiar way of being. And so I want to talk about the difference here because there is some nuance like one teacher that you've probably heard me talk about, and a book that I've even recommended on one of my episodes is Esther Hicks, who is someone who's been around for a long time, since the early two thousands, and she's written, I don't know, dozens of books, and I think the one that I recommended was called Money and the Law of Attraction. But the Law of attraction, that phrase, it has become kind of part of our regular vernacular, like we talk about that, least among my group of friends and people who I'm around, I hear that phrase thrown around kind of a lot. And then there was that movie that came out called The Secret and Esther Hicks was a big part of that. Anyways, she's writ and dozens of books, including Money in the Law of Attraction. But her main point is that what we think about is what we manifest. And she's not the only one who talks about this. There are tons of people out there who talk about the power of positive thinking and that if we can kind of set our vision or set our mindset on something really beautiful and we can have gratitude and we can focus on what we do want, that what we do want will grow. And so this is where my idea had come from, that if I could pull myself out of this negative mood. If I could just focus myself on something that was, you know, more positive, or that brought me a sense of peace or love or joy or whatever, that maybe I could move myself out of this quote unquote negative mood and into a more positive mood. And this idea didn't always come from Esther Hicks. Ester Hicks didn't come into my life until much later. But I would imagine that my upbringing and evangelicalism also played a role in this. And then also we'll talk of a couple different elements. Let's start with evangelicalism. So I grew up in evangelicalism, and if you didn't grow up in evangelicalism, you just it's kind of it's so funny. I was at dinner the other night with a couple. Matt and I were at dinner with a couple friend of ours. So this couple and Matt and I were chatting, and neither of them grew up in the evangelical church like Matt and I did. And so sometimes when we have meals with people like that, or when we get to chatting with them, we're telling stories and their jaws are on the floor. Because if you didn't grow up in in like evangelicalism, especially in the eighties and nineties, it's such a subculture of its own that you kind of can't even fathom what it might have been. Like like if you didn't go to youth group in the nineties, you just can't believe the stuff that was done, like purity culture stuff. You know, my youth pastor put droplets of pea and a water bottle and asked if we wanted to drink it, and he said, even the slightest impurity makes the water impure, and nobody wants to drink it. Matt was telling a story about how his youth pastor used an old baseball glove to describe how you don't want to put your hand into someone else's baseball glove that's formed to their hand, to describe like why kids shouldn't have sex before they're married. Wild that that was even allowed, Like wild that like a twenty year old youth pastor was leading a group of you know, sixteen to eighteen year old kids, a male youth faster leading teenage girls, and like so much about it is just crazy to me. And maybe there are still churches there probably are where that type of stuff is still taking place, but it was extremely normal back in the nineties, and part of evangelical culture, I think had some element of this sort of stay positive, like God's got this even on your darkest day. You know, God is your protector, he's your comfort, or God's going to take care of this. And here's where things get really sticky, because my current present day spirituality would still allow for a statement like God is your comforter. You know, God can comfort you. So it's not that I think that that statement is necessarily wrong, but I think that wrapped up in evangelicalism, it came with kind of this sense of denihalism, where we're going to turn a blind eye to anything that doesn't fit the shiny image that we want to have. We're not going to look at things that would taint the image of the church. We're not going to really pay attention to that. We want to sort of clean up our act and clean up the scene and clean up the image and clean up the brand and really keep things kind of like pure and above board. And because of that, I think that evangelicalism played a role in this pattern, the patterning that's laid down in my brain that says, you know, depression isn't okay, sadness isn't okay, fear isn't okay, feeling low isn't okay, because God can take care of all of that. And I know that if you grew up in the evangelical face like I did, you probably also heard some version of the rhetoric around anti depressants or anti anxiety medication or other kind of pharmaceutical drugs. I know that if you grew up in the evangelical faith like I did, you probably also heard some version of the rhetoric around anti depressants or anti anxiety medication or other kind of pharmaceutical drugs. That this idea that if you needed to rely on depression medication, or if you needed to rely on anxiety medication, that you probably needed to do that because you hadn't trusted God enough, you hadn't trusted Jesus enough to come and cleanse you from your sins or cleanse you from your unrighteousness, and you just really needed more prayer, and you probably needed to come up to an alter call, and you maybe needed to repent of the sins in your life, and then you would be freed of this burden of depression or anxiety. And so I'm not blaming anyone, and I'm not even I don't feel like antagonistic necessarily toward any of the people who believes these things or taught these things. I'm just more speaking about, like how did the tracks get laid down in my brain that said, feeling sad is not okay, Feeling low is not okay, especially in light of a situation where I'm seven months pregnant. I am, you know, working my butt off to try to provide for my family. I'm anticipating the fact that I'm about to have a baby, and I'm not gonna be able to take a break. I'm trying to provide for all these employees. I'm worried about people having to get fired and losing their their source of income, and so i have every circumstantial reason to feel the way that I'm feeling. And yet I'm still going no, no, no, We're not going there. We're gonna make ourselves feel happy somehow. So again, this conversation is extremely nuanced because there is an element where what Esther Hicks has written about has value, has merit is important, can be useful even the messages of evangelical Church from my childhood. God is your comfort or God brings you peace. You know you can pray to God and call out to Him at any time and He will come and meet you. And yet there's a small nuance here that God comes to meet us where we're at, meaning I don't need to pull myself up to God somehow to meet God in happiness. It's not like God can only meet me my happiness. God can't meet me in my depression. Well, the way I would say it now is that all of it is God. That God is with you in your grief. God is with you in your depression. God is with you in your sadness, in your fear, in your survival mode. God is there. God is already with you in it. It is God. It all is God. The joy is God, the peace is God. All of it is God. And that God wraps us and envelops us in all kinds of moments. One of the things I'm learning is that it is safe to feel exactly what you feel in any given moment, and you can give yourself permission to feel it fully and completely without needing to change it. The analogy of the weather patterns is such a powerful analogy because imagine how crazy you would feel if you thought that it was your job to adjust the patterns of weather. Imagine how absolutely insane you would feel if you believed that in order to be close to God, or in order to have a spirituality or a faith, or in order to be a good person or to be okay, that you needed to decide what days it rained and what days it was sunny, and what days it was cloudy, and what days it was windy, and you needed to somehow alter or adjust or manipulate what is what is just true, what is just there? You would start to feel insane. And so there's this dichotomy of a culture that says, you know, in order to be a good person, in order to be liked by others, in order to you know, get promoted, in order to have a good life, you need to kind of see things through this one lens. You need to like, be happy, be positive, smile more, think about positive things, be grateful for the things you do have. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being grateful for the things that you do have, but for someone who has every circumstantial reason to feel sad or feel low, or be depressed, or have anxiety or whatever else. It's an insane thing to ask of them to also be grateful, or to also be happy, or to also feel joy in that moment. And here's one of the things that I've been learning in the last five years, which, in addition to allowing myself to just feel what it is that I feel as circumstances unfold in my life, there are moments where it's totally appropriate to just feel sad, just feel grief, just feel utter despair, feel hopelessness. For the first time in my life, in the last five years, I have allowed myself to feel hopeless. And if you've been around the show for a while and you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I've had a really challenging last five years, and especially in the last year. I lost a baby, I lost my dad, Matt lost a business, we lost almost our entire life savings. We've been trying to put the pieces of that back together, and it's been a really challenging couple of years, and I have allowed myself in moments to just sink into utter hopelessness, like this will never get better. It's never going to change. It's always going to be this way. And a previous version of me would have thought, no, no, no, don't let yourself go there. It's not hopeless. Like with God, there's always hope. And yet I've allowed myself to dissent into utter hopelessness because the circumstances warrant it allow for it, and because it's so human and healthy to allow yourself to experience a passing weather pattern of hopelessness. And what I've found through that is that when I can allow myself to experience whatever it is that I'm experiencing in the moment, that actually, as the weather pattern passes, a different weather pattern comes in and I get to experience a deeper, higher, bigger joy, a deeper, higher, bigger gratitude that isn't forced, that isn't coerced, that isn't manipulated, that's just is. It's like gratitude just is who I am. It just is in me in the same way that hopelessness is there. Hopelessness just moves through, and then gratitude moves through. And when gratitude moves through, it moves through in a truer kind of a way. Because I'm not trying to drum it up out of nowhere. And so what I want to talk about is the difference between toxic positivity and joy. They sound so different, and you're like, of course they're different, but I do think we get these two things mixed up. We get mixed up with what we think is joy. We think we have to drum up joy and control our circumstances in order to feel joy, and I think we really get it wrong, and we actually miss out on true joy, because true joy can flood into your body when you least expect it, or when it makes no sense to feel joy or pleasure or peace. True joy and peace can flood into your body when it makes no sense to feel those things. And the only way that it can do that is when we learn to allow these experiences to pass through us, like weather patterns that we have no control over, the insanity that we would feel if we were told you have to control that, you have to feel happy all the time, you have to feel you have to feel gratitude every day, we would feel insane. And maybe you do feel insane. And I think this is particularly true for anyone who has had really traumatic experiences in their lives if you have PTSD, if you have a trauma that's living in your body, the idea that you should have to feel gratitude at certain moments feels impossible and feels almost violent against what you're facing, what you're dealing with. And when I think back to the woman who I was in twenty twenty standing in my kitchen posting that quote Instagram, I have a lot of compassion for her, because you know, it's no fun to feel depressed, it's no fun to feel hopeless. So I was just really trying to get myself to a new place. And yet, and yet, there is a big difference between joy and toxic positivity. And toxic positivity, drumming up positivity from nowhere is toxic positivity. My definition for toxic positivity would be a positivity that you feel you need to manipulate or control in order to think or feel differently about your life from how you actually think or feel. So, a positivity that you need to manipulate or control in order to feel differently or think differently about your life because you assume that the way you think or feel about your life is not okay. And what I want to say, what I've been learning, And what I would invite you into is that the way you think and feel about your life is fine. The way you think about your life, the way you feel about your life right now is okay. And you can allow yourself to feel those things and think those things. And what ends up happening, or at least what's ended up happening for me, is that I let go of the need to control how I feel about a situation, and as I let go of the need to control the situation itself. Because these are the two sides of the same coin, right, We either think I need to control the situation to make it better so I can feel better, or I need to decide I'm going to feel differently about this situation. Those are like our two ways to fix the problem that's happening, or what we perceive is the problem. But what if what if it's equally insane to think that I could control my feelings as it is to think I can control the situation. So it's like, Okay, I feel depressed. The two ways to fix this are I change my circumstances or I change my attitude and think about how normal this has been for most of us. I assume it's normal. I grew up in an environment where like this was also good parenting, you know, like change your attitude, like get on board with the rest of the family. We're going on this trip. It's going to be fun. And I do this to my kids too. It's like you woke up in a cranky mood, like, hey, let's turn the frown upside down. Let's have a great day together. And yet it's insane to think that we could change our circumstances. Equally is insane to think we could change how we feel about our circumstances. What if, and here's what I've been learning. What if we could allow exactly what is to be what is? And what if that would give way to something different. Just like the weather changes, just like today is rainy and tomorrow is sunny. Just like yesterday was foggy and today is different. Just like it was windy last week and it's not windy this week. What if the weather would change, and inevitably we would experience a little bit of all of it. Inevitably will experience a little bit of grief. Inevitably will experience a little bit of fear. Inevitably will experience a little bit of joy. This is extremely nuanced. I think I've said that about hundred times in this episode. This is extremely nuanced because there is a lot of research that shows, for example, how helpful it can be to mood to make a gratitude list, just as one example, so making a gratitude list each day and dramatically improve your mood. So you might say, well, there you go. See you can change your mood. You can affect your mood, improve your mood, alter your mood, manipulate your mood. Okay, yes, if the things that you're listing that you're grateful for are things that you're actually grateful for, not things that you're not grateful for. The reason why, in my opinion, that a gratitude list would help you to shift out of a low mood, let's say, is because it provides extra perspective and it helps you to round out the perspective that not all is bad. But what I think a lot of times we do, and what I would call toxic positivity, is we take a situation that sucks and you try to make a gratitude out of it, like I'm so grateful that you know we're in lockdown right now because it's just giving me extra time to focus on the things that really matter to me, Like you know whatever, A lot of us did that during the lockdown. A lot of us do that. I still find myself doing that sometimes when I don't want to feel what it is that I'm feeling. And yet, what if we could allow ourselves to fully feel whatever it is that we're feeling. We're terrified of this, like absolutely petrified to feel what we're actually feeling. What if you could just ask yourself, what is the thing that I'm feeling right now, without manipulating, without trying to control it, without having any agenda, without judging it. What if you could just let yourself be sad or scared or mad. That's another hard one, especially as women, we don't let ourselves be mad. But what if you could just give yourself permission to just be whatever it is that you are right now. Maybe you're tired, Maybe things for you right now feel extremely unfair. What would it look like to just allow yourself to feel angry that it's unfair, it is unfair. What if I could validate that it is unfair. Your circumstances are unfair, This is unfair, And what has shocked me is that when I allow myself to feel what is, when I allow myself to accept and receive what is, it's actually joy that follows. It's actually gratitude that follows. Gratitude is my nature. Joy is my nature. And when I allow the other sensations to move through my body, it's almost like they carve a deeper rut for the river of joy to run through. And I recently sent an email to my email list about suffering and about how much effort we all spend in our life trying to avoid suffering. And I said, if we all came together and we were telling stories around a campfire, we would have a ragtag collection of stories of all the ways that we've tried to avoid suffering. Maybe it's addiction, maybe it's control, maybe whatever it is really religion, Like whatever it is for you, you have your own way that you've tried to avoid suffering. You've tried to avoid the part of you that feels sad, that feels angry, that feels terrified, that feels hopeless, that feels despair. You're so terrified to feel those feelings. I am too, So we all have our ways of avoiding them and yet suffering is a doorway, Suffering is an invitation to a deeper kind of life. Suffering is inherently human, and without our suffering, we lose touch with our humanity. And so we think that we need to be like the duck on the water, who's you know, like paddling as hard as they can under the water, but just looks so peaceful on the surface. And we assume that we need to move through the world that way. But what if we're actually doing a disservice not only to ourselves, but also to other people, because we lose touch with our humanity, and then they don't see humanity on our faces and they lose touch with their humanity. And what if accessing our own humanity is contagious? What if allowing allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you feel about your current set of circumstances, or just maybe not even your current set of circumstances. Maybe what you feel makes no sense. Maybe you're depressed even though you live in a beautiful world, Like maybe you're like, why do I feel so depressed because my life is amazing. Maybe you feel sad and you don't know why. Maybe you feel angry and you're not sure what it's connected to, but maybe you just allow yourself to be in the pattern of weather that's there right now and allow it to move through. And if you could do that, if we could do that and really deeply connect to our humanity, maybe it would be of service to your community. Maybe it would be a healing balm that you could offer to those around you. I taught my first yoga class a couple of weeks ago, and I was so nervous to teach the class. And my friend Alissa, who's been in the training with me, she's also teaching her first class this upcoming Wednesday, and so we've been in this together and she's been such a huge support to me and I've been so thankful for her. Anyway, she asked me, how did you get through the nerves of your first class? And I had to think about it for a minute because I was just like, I don't know, you just kind of like jump in the deep end and go. But one of the things that I did. A strategy that I used was connecting my anxiety to the anxiety that you feel as a beginner walking into your first yoga class, because I remember that anxiety so vividly, and because this class that I'm teaching, which is a free class at the studio, is a lot of beginners, because this is how people get introduced to the practice of yoga, So a lot of people come to this community class. It's a free class or by donation only, so they're able to come and just kind of try it out and see if they like it. So people are coming for the first time. I remember that feeling of walking into the yoga room and being like, I have no idea what I'm doing. So I used my feelings of fear to connect with other people in the room who might also be feeling fear, and it made me realize if I had tried to pretend like, no, no, no, I'm fine, I'm not nervous, it's totally good. I've got this under control. If I was faking it until I made it with confidence, I wouldn't have been able to make that connection to others in the room who were also feeling what I was feeling. And so instead we can go yeah, it's scary to do something new, Yep, I'm right here with you. Yep, I'm not going anywhere. Yep, I feel it too. One more example I'll share and then I'll wrap up. We recently had a week of crazy weather. I think I talked about it on an episode A Week of Crazy Weather, where we had tornado sirens go off several times, and we were racing where our bedrooms downstairs, our kids are upstairs, racing up to get the kids, getting everybody's stuff, running over to the tornado shelter which is next door. And my daughter has been having a lot of fear about tornadoes, and one of the things I realized that I was doing was trying to put on a brave face to help her feel safe. And the thing that has worked better than anything else. I tried all of the strategies. I tried, every thing I tried to implement that didn't work. She was still feeling so afraid, she was having hard time sleeping. She was really wanting me to help her fall asleep and fall back asleep when she woke up in the middle of the night. The one thing that worked was telling her I feel scared too, and I'm right here and I'm not going anywhere, and I'm right here with you. We're in this together. There's something that's so deeply comforting about that, And I think there are a lot of reasons why there's a big epidemic of depression and anxiety that's growing in our culture. Right now, I'm reading The Anxious Generation, which is a fantastic book and I would highly recommend. So there's a lot of reasons, including smartphones and technology, that are causing this epidemic of anxiety and depression. But one of the reasons I think we're having such a spike and anxiety and depression is because it is crazy making to be a human being in a hurting world and look around and everyone else seems fine. It's absolute insanity. It feels like I'm losing my mind. So maybe you feel like that. Maybe you look around and you see a bunch of kind of Stepford faces of people who seem like, Yeah, everything's going great, we're doing good. We're just you know, life is good. We're going on vacation, we're doing this, we're doing that. Everything's fine, and you feel like the world is falling apart. The world is on fire around you, and you can hardly hold it together, and you don't feel permission to fall apart because no one else is falling apart, And it's like the mom who's trying to play it cool so that her kid doesn't feel safe. But what you really need is for someone to say, Yep, I feel it too, Yep. It's a hard time to be alive. Yep. Man, being a human is really tough. It's been a hard week for us. You know, we've really been through it. Maybe if we could all do that, we would feel a little less alone. We'd feel a little more connected to ourselves, to our own humanity, to something bigger than us, to our communities, to people around us, to our families. So I invite you to unwind and unravel and untravel the roads in your brain that say you have to have it all together. You need to stay positive, You need to find a reason to be grateful. You need to be grateful for the challenges because they are the what teach you that is there. Like I am just now getting to the point five years into this journey where I'm starting to feel grateful for the challenges that have brought me here to this moment. But not because I told myself I had to be grateful, but because it's a weather pattern that's passing through. It's been five years of a lot of challenges and just now, because of my openness, because of my willingness to feel what I'm feeling, a weather pattern is entering in that's showing me this is a beautiful thing. This is a beautiful thing that you've lived through. This is a beautiful thing that you've witnessed. And I'm getting to see that from a different vantage point. But not because I told myself I have to be grateful, not because I'm pulling myself up in my mootstraps. Only because I'm allowing myself to feel exactly as anxious, as hopeless, as desperate, as in despair, as jealous, as whatever, as I have actually felt. So I invite you into that process with me, and I invite you to start small and just ask yourself, what am I feeling right now that I'm scared to feel. Can I give myself five minutes to just feel it? Just let it be okay? Whatever it is. I am in this with you. I'm feeling it with you. You're not crazy, you haven't lost your mind. Your perspective is valid. Trust it, trust yourself, and I'll see you back here next week on to Write Your Story podcast