Week 44: What If the Goal Isn’t to Feel Better?
Last week, we talked about how, of course, it feels hard to be okay right now.
The world feels heavy. Our bodies feel it. Our hearts feel it. Our minds feel it.
And so many of us are asking:
“How do I feel better?”
“How do I stop feeling like this?”
“When will this get easier?”
Those are real, human questions.
And let’s be honest: wanting to feel better makes complete sense. Of course we long for relief. Of course we want the weight to lift.
But today, I want to offer something that might feel like a contradiction at first—and still, I believe it’s true:
What if the goal isn’t to feel better?
What if the goal isn’t to outrun the hard feelings?
What if the goal is to build a life that can hold all of it—the beauty, the pain, and everything in between?
Resilience: Learning to Live in the Both/And
Relief says, Make this feeling stop.
Resilience says, I can stay with myself even when it’s hard.
One is about escape.
The other is about connection—to yourself, your values, your truth.
It’s tempting to think we need to wait for the world to calm down before we can breathe again.
But if we wait for the storms to pass, we might miss the life happening inside the storms.
The truth is: life will always hold moments that are beautiful, brutal, and everything in between.
And we deserve tools—not shame—for how to meet ourselves in the mess.
Resilience is not about feeling good all the time.
It is about learning to hold conflicting truths at once.
You can feel deep sadness and still find moments of joy.
You can grieve the state of the world and still laugh at something beautiful.
You can be overwhelmed by fear and still choose to hope.
This is the dialectic of resilience: the ability to honor both your heartbreak and your humanity without erasing either.
You are not failing if you feel many things at once.
You are simply being human.
Three Gentle Shifts for This Moment
Here are three small but powerful shifts I am working on with clients—and with myself—right now:
1. Trade Judgment for Curiosity
Instead of telling yourself, “I shouldn’t feel this way,” try asking:
“What is my body trying to tell me?”
“What is this feeling asking for?”
Curiosity invites gentleness.
Gentleness invites healing.
Healing doesn’t always look like less pain; sometimes, it looks like more permission.
2. Let Coping Look Like Living
Coping does not have to mean meditation cushions or perfectly curated morning routines. Sometimes coping looks like:
Eating a real meal when you wanted to skip it.
Laughing at a ridiculous meme when you feel overwhelmed.
Texting "thinking of you" even when you don’t have the energy for a full conversation.
Letting yourself love something silly, joyful, and small.
Small acts of living are acts of courage right now.
They are not distractions from healing—they are healing.
3. Measure Capacity, Not Productivity
In hard seasons, it is easy to measure ourselves by output:
“How much am I getting done?”
“Why am I moving so slowly?”
“Why can’t I keep up?”
But your capacity is not static.
It breathes. It shifts. It deserves respect, not comparison.
Some days, your biggest win might be getting out of bed.
Other days, it might be having a hard conversation, finishing a project, or simply letting yourself feel proud for trying.
Instead of asking, “Did I do enough today?”, ask:
“Did I meet myself where I was?”
“Did I honor my capacity, even if it was smaller than I wished?”
That is the real work.
The World Might Stay Harsh. You Don’t Have to Be.
The world asks a lot of us right now—more than feels fair, more than feels human. It demands urgency, toughness, endless endurance.
But you do not have to match the world’s hardness with your own. You do not have to meet cruelty with self-criticism, or chaos with self-neglect.
You are allowed to be a soft place for yourself.
You are allowed to protect your tenderness, to prioritize your breath, and to choose stillness when everything else shouts for more.
Softness is not surrender.
It is survival.
It is a quiet, radical act of saying: I will not become what breaks me.
Finally...
Maybe “feeling better” isn’t the real measure of healing.
Maybe the measure is something quieter, something deeper:
Did I stay connected to my humanity today?
Did I offer myself even a sliver of grace?
Did I honor the complexity of how I feel without rushing to fix it?
This week, you do not need to fix yourself.
You do not need to solve everything.
You do not even need to feel better.
You just need to keep showing up—with tenderness, with breath, and with whatever capacity you have.
You are not doing it wrong if you are tired.
You are not doing it wrong if it still feels heavy.
You are doing something extraordinary:
You are staying human in an inhuman time.
And that, in itself, is enough.
