It’s okay to feel shitty

Introduced first on my private email list.

“What is most personal is most universal”
Carl R. Rogers

I hesitated a very long time before posting such a deeply personal article, but that quote made me realize my experience could really resonate with others.

I recently became aware that I wasn’t allowing myself to feel shitty, and this was simply not okay. Very conscious of being a privileged white male, I would simply deny any struggle. I’m too lucky to complain. I’m okay. I’m fine. Everything is great.

Well, not everything is great. To start with, New York is a very challenging city to live in, it can get very lonely here. I didn’t grow up here, so my closest friends are very far away. Of course I “know” a ton of people, but can I really call those people my friends? Working as a freelancer, I don’t have too many opportunities to meet new people and when I do it’s mainly about business. Being surrounded by millions of people is the easiest way to feel lonely.

Everyone is here for business, and at times there doesn’t seem to be any other valid reason to be here. It’s an immense pressure; you are here to succeed. You have to succeed, or you are wasting your time, your energy, your money, basically: your whole life. I realized that as time went by, I was only sharing the great things happening in my life with my family, my friends, and on social media. And don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great things in my life and I’m very grateful for them. But there is also plenty of other shitty, hard to handle stuff, and I was hiding it.

The instability of my life here is unbelievable. Last Monday, I received an amazing business proposal; it looked concrete, the money was big, and I was looking to the future by researching investment properties in France. Five days later, the project had fallen through and I was beginning to freak out about how I was gonna afford my next rent payment.

From thinking about buying a house, to worrying about paying your rent FIVE days later… Talk about an emotional roller-coaster!

NYC can make you feel ecstatic with the number of things you can discover everyday; the crazy, creative experiments and business opportunities that you couldn’t find anywhere else. But it can also make you feel anxious and doubtful about your choices; why am I paying a crazy amount of money for a one bedroom here when I could have a house for the same amount somewhere else. Like, in Spain… next to the beach! “Really?! What the f***k am I doing here?!” is playing over and over in my mind as often as: “I love this city so much!”.

And here is the real challenge of this city; finding the lifestyle balance and continuing to make it worth it, on every level. It took me some time to realize that my main strategy for dealing with that was to simply lie to myself about the shitty stuff, essentially I was lying to myself about my true feelings.

The biggest side-effect of not accepting the shitty stuff and not accepting your struggles, is simple: You won’t receive any support. When I eventually shared my situation with my friends, they were really surprised and also… relieved. They finally felt like I was a normal, relatable human, not this high-achieving, mountain-climbing, super-charged image I was (subconsciously) allowing them to see. I was more than just my Instagram feed. When you don’t embrace shitty feelings, you isolate yourself from the normal world, the people we should share both our struggles and successes with. My friends were actually glad to hear that I was more like them, facing everyday ups and downs, and I started to feel much more supported. I began to feel less shitty.

Allowing myself to feel shitty and to share it, put me back in touch with the community of “normal people”, and I began to feel less lonely. Social media doesn’t help us, it’s just the perfect platform for the “who-has-the-best-life” competition. It’s easy to hide the not-so-perfect aspects of your life, simply because they’re deemed not “cool” or interesting enough. Hiding these sides of your life means hiding who you really are. We’re hiding what makes us human. And when you begin to not be human anymore, you isolate yourself, you feel even shittier, and you fake it even harder.

Today, I want to be a human again. Today, I want to accept that it’s healthy to feel shitty sometimes. It’s okay because I am fortunate to have good people around me, near and far. Today I want to be a human again, because I like myself better like that than being a storytelling robot who uses Instagram as his only bright reality.

Today is already less shitty.