Sitting in the shit

Warning: overindulgent use of the word shit

We live in a world where we only show our ‘best’ selves, not our human selves in all our delicious contradictions and dark complexities. Positivity has 32.6 million tags on Instagram. Happiness has 161m. Because they are presented as goals, as statuses to achieve, we feel somehow less than if we feel anything other than positive or happy. The performance we put on to present as well is astounding and entirely dysphoric.

The idea that positivity or happiness could somehow be a goal is now mind blowing to me. Goals are things you intend to achieve, emotions are things you might feel along the way. But I sucked this narrative up, and I felt like a failure every time I felt sad. Still do sometimes. It took two years of therapy for me to unlearn the idea that difficult emotions are unnatural, abhorrent, to be avoided.

The problem with our problem with feeling uncomfortable is that the reaction is usually to speed up, react, to suppress and crack on. But when you react to difficult feelings too quickly, you get that revolting, chaotic, evil sense that you’re a ball in a pinball machine, and someone else or something nameless is pinging you around at random. When you suppress fear and anxiety, you also suppress joy. You make it a hell of a lot harder to lift the lid on what it is that you most desire, on ways to become more of yourself.

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

Anaïs Nin, French-Cuban-American diarist

Because I was so scared of difficult feelings, I became stagnant, sludge-like. For years I was wary of changing anything ‘big’ in case I might feel sad or bad or anxious. The reality is, however, that you can’t outrun change — even if you don’t happen to it, it’ll happen to you. The second reality is that change is always going to spark uncomfortable feelings, no matter if it’s a change that is within your control or without. Even the changes we intentionally make to become more ourselves spark fear, doubt, anger.

Credit: @sighswoon on Instagram

Learning to sit with these emotions — learning to sit in the shit — increases your window of tolerance and gives you the grace and space to discern whether you are making changes or responding to change in alignment with your values. And it gives you the capacity then to stick with those creations and responses and see them through.

How can you learn to sit in the shit?

Everyone has their own process for this. Here’s a few ideas (which also happen to be some of my core values!) that I hope might spark something for you.

Pace

The first step is teaching yourself to s l o w d o w n rather than speed up. Really, the answer to most questions is to slow down. That old phrase ‘sleep on it’ is an absolutely diamond sparkling piece of wisdom. Sleep and other forms of rest allow your body to integrate the change and move from a high-level, intellectual understanding to a deeper, embodied understanding that sits in your belly and bones.

Curiosity

What parts of yourself are reacting to this change, and what’s triggering them to react in this way? Where does the fear come from? Have you felt it before? What is different in this situation to that past situation(s)?

Where the shit sits, also sit the wild things. The subconscious parts of yourself that have learnt stuff you don’t even remember learning. A gentle probing curiosity into those fearful, reactive selves can be the first step to not just uncovering your past, but reconnecting with yourself in the present.

“Wherever there is tension, it needs attention.”

Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author

Humour

A sense of irony and play is always a valid strategy for deepening your relationship to your own shit (not as in your poo). Humour, plus a little imagination, allows you to transcend your situation and help you not to be moralistic about whether or not you are being a good human in feeling the way you are.

“A little clean, honest wit can save you from the heavy seriousness that gives life a tragic tone. The odd thing is that your dark night need not be tragic. You can see through it and beyond it.”

Thomas Moore, English social philosopher

Loving

So the inevitable thing about sitting with all this stuff through a change is that you feel a bit…shit. And sometimes (quite often) you’ll take a knock to your self-esteem, which makes taking care of yourself difficult as you don’t really feel worth taking care of.

And… that’s okay! Sometimes it be that way. But loving is a daily, hourly, minute by minute practice that’s all about small choices. And sometimes that practice has to be done without the expectation of feeling loved because of it.

It’ll come and go, the feeling of being loved, but the practice of loving remains. It can become a thread of consistency woven through transition. So whatever you do for yourself that makes you feel loved in the good times, try not to completely drop it all during the difficult times.