This Is How (2 page)

H
OW TO
F
EEL
L
IKE
S
HIT

W
IPE THAT FUCKING SMILE
off your face.

Unless, of course, you didn’t put it there. If it just happened, great. You can leave it be.

But if you did manufacture that smile to try to maintain a sunny, positive attitude, get rid of it. Put your bitter scowl back on.

And stop standing up so straight.

Instead of trying to alleviate some of the uncomfortable and unpleasant emotions you feel by “trying to be positive,” try being negative instead.

You can stand in front of your affirmations mirror if that makes you feel better. But this time, name the actual feeling you feel and not the daisy wallpaper version.

Even if the sound of these feelings spoken out loud is so ugly to your ears. Even if it takes you a long time to find the words. These can be your new
Rosemary’s Baby
Affirmations.

This will help you get in touch with how you actually feel.

“I feel hopeless and fat and stupid. And like a failure for feeling this way. And trying to be positive and upbeat makes me feel angry and feeling angry makes me feel like I am broken, like it works for everyone else.”

If that’s how you feel—however you feel—then you have a baseline, you have established a real solid floor of reference. Even if sometimes you feel more negative than you want to admit or more depressed or lonelier, it’s important to observe your feelings instead of trying to manage them or turn away from them.

You can inspect these feelings, individually.

“So why does trying to be positive make me . . . angry?”

You can investigate why you might feel a certain way. See if you can trace the feeling all the way back to the first time you felt it in this context. Anything you learn about your feelings and why you might feel them is potentially useful because you may end up recognizing what it is you need to change in order to actually start to feel better and not merely tell yourself that you feel fine.

Maybe you feel pressure to be positive because so many people rely on your good, fake-positive energy? If that’s the case, screw everybody else. You’re not a bottle of Valium.

You know, sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions. Almost like you’re letting them out into the backyard to run around and get rid of some of that energy. Optimism is pretty much an essential quality if you want to be a relatively happy, contented person. But a positive outlook can’t be purchased through a few affirmations thrown against the mirror.

Optimism sprouts from the knowledge that
you
are in
control of your own life, not your past and not those around you. Part of being in control is taking responsibility for how you feel. This means not just admitting to uncomfortable feelings but then examining your circumstances to see what can be done to change these feelings at the source.

Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.

This means asking yourself questions like, are these negative feelings you’re experiencing the result of something in your life right now? Or have they been simmering away in your cauldron of mental sickness for years and years?

Negative feelings and behaviors transform over time into compulsions and habits. In my experience, these kinds of feelings need to be broken, not resolved. They have become habits, long drained of their emotional power.

I was angry for many years with a friend, and at a certain point, this anger felt dusty to me. I was tired of looking at it, tired of having it inside me. I did little more than ask myself, “So wait, am I still holding on to all that anger? Really?”

The answer came in the form of a dry sadness, an old sadness. And a resignation. But there was no longer any anger. There was even some compassion.

All I had to do to reach this truth was to ask myself how I felt about the person, in real time, and then listen for the answer.

Sometimes, people avoid recognizing how they feel because they believe the feelings are a part of them, and admitting to harboring anger or jealousy feels like admitting to a physical flaw. So certain feelings are denied. Which is something like believing your house is clean as long as you don’t peek under the beds.

But feelings, no matter how strong or “ugly,” are not a part
of who you are. They are the radio stations your mind listens to if you don’t give it something better to do. Feelings are fluid and dynamic; they change frequently.

Feelings are something you
have
, not something you
are.
Like physical beauty, a cold sore, or an opinion.

Admitting you feel rage or terrible pain or regret or some old, rotten blame does not mean these feelings are part of who you are as a person. What these feelings mean is, you need to change your thinking to be free of them. Maybe you need to stop fiddling with an old wound and stirring up these old feelings.

It may be frightening at first to allow your true feelings to the surface; it may even feel dangerous. But it’s much more dangerous to your emotional well-being to wish or deny a feeling away.

If your feelings are fresh—say, anger toward a friend—talk about it with them. Keyword: talk. Yelling at somebody because you’re angry with them isn’t expressing your anger; it’s venting it in their face. If you occasionally use a toilet for the purposes of making the whole process of human waste elimination and removal just a little bit more refined, you can also use a more carefully and respectfully modulated voice to eliminate your human anger.

Of course, every now and then, a guy’s gotta just piss in the woods or, if he’s a city guy, he’s got to make do with the sink. So when talking about your anger just doesn’t scratch that itch to scream and throw things, you need to not scream and throw things but, instead, see the anger for what it is: fuel. Pissed-off people can accomplish a lot if they don’t just spray their rage fuel all over the place but instead use it to power a novel or a business plan or something else productive. This can be done.
There is an instant of choice before the fist explodes into the wall or the face: let it, don’t let it. It feels almost like a sneeze—stopping yourself from exploding feels frustrating like a sneeze that won’t arrive. But only for an instant. Then, you feel relief that you contained it. Even if the anger is still there.

Rage is a hot, fast-burning fuel. It can be powerful and useful. Or not.

Not to frighten you or anything but if you do happen to feel angry at a friend or even your spouse or partner and you don’t express it? The anger will not eventually evaporate. It will ferment into resentment.

Resentment is anger looking for payback. It’s also a high-interest-earning emotion. Each new resentment is added to the ones from before. Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred.

Hatred is clinical-strength anger.

If you feel hatred for somebody you should see a therapist. Not because feeling hatred is abnormal or a sign of mental illness, but because it’s powerful and complex. It’s also highly corrosive, so without the insulating, protective container of therapy, hatred can eat a hole right through the center of your life.

Frequently, you hate somebody you love or you hate something you want but are afraid to want. Hatred can be made from feelings of rejection or jealousy—powerful emotions. And you don’t want to fuck up something important in your life, even if you hate it at the moment. Where there is hate, there should be extra care.

For these reasons, hatred can be extremely beneficial and its acidic properties can kind of scrub your life clean, acting as an abrasive to help you remove indecision and dissolve
confinements and limitations. Which takes insight and experience.

All improvements, transformations, achievements, liberations; everything you want to change about yourself and your life; everything you want to make happen, any obstacle you want to overcome, any crisis you must survive—the prerequisite is being able to allow yourself to feel whatever it is you feel and not pretend to feel something you don’t.

So the first thing you need to do if you want to truly improve your life, or just survive the worst it has to throw your way, is to go now and stand before your bathroom mirror.

And wipe that fucking smile off your face.

H
OW TO
F
IND
L
OVE