One of the first things I tell people when everything is falling apart is this: what you're feeling is not the enemy. That is especially true now. Most of my social media connections are quite distressed about the current things happening politically, including the assaults on many aspects of our lives. I repeat: Your feelings aren’t the problem.
That sounds simple. It isn't.
Most of us spent decades learning the opposite. Push through. Don't dwell. Stay positive. Keep moving. And when those strategies stopped working — when the anxiety wouldn't go away, when the grief kept showing up uninvited, when the anger started bleeding into everything — we assumed something was wrong with us.
I met Lisa early in the research for this book. She was a single mom, an elementary school teacher, someone who had spent her whole life taking care of other people. By the time we talked, she was exhausted in a way that sleep couldn't fix. She described feeling "hollowed out" — present in her life but not really in it.
She told me she was embarrassed by how she felt. That people had it so much worse. That she didn't have a right to feel this way.
I've heard some version of that from almost everyone I've worked with. The idea that your feelings need to be earned. That you're only entitled to struggle if the circumstances are bad enough.
Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to develop Logotherapy, argued that meaning can be found in any circumstances — but only if you're honest about what those circumstances are actually doing to you. You can't navigate toward meaning from a position of denial.
I think of feelings the way I think about smoke alarms. When one goes off, you don't rip it from the ceiling. You find out what's burning. The alarm is information. Uncomfortable, urgent, sometimes maddening — but information.
What Lisa needed wasn't to feel less. She needed help understanding what her feelings were pointing at. Once she started listening instead of suppressing, things started to shift. Not because her circumstances changed immediately — they didn't — but because she stopped spending energy fighting herself.
That's the first move in staying strong: stop treating your own interior life like a problem to be managed. It's trying to tell you something.
The question is whether you're willing to slow down long enough to hear it.
Staying Strong in Unsteady Times is available now.