Catharine I’ve had one of those days. One of my kids has had food poisoning. My back is trying to spasm. I’ve spent hours trying to clean and feel like I’ve hardly made a dent.
Something that helps me is to realize that there are no easy answers. There is no bandaid that can fix life, can make everything all line up. They don’t give you gold stars as adults (though sometimes I REALLY wish someone would give me a gold star!)
In our culture, we drive ourselves towards rewards, and we expect an outcome to all our efforts. What do we do when the outcome doesn’t happen? Or we work and we work and we fail? Or no one is around to recognize how hard we are trying, and there isn’t the praise and admiration we crave?
What do you do when the carrot-and-stick mentality we innately have, and have been trained to embrace, isn’t working anymore? When you’re chasing a prize that no matter how hard you run, you never reach?
Acceptance.
Acceptance doesn’t fix the problems, and it doesn’t make anything better, or anything change.
We can look to Heaven, and we can remember that life on earth isn’t supposed to be perfect. But honestly, I’ve heard those words a lot, and they haven’t really done anything to make me feel better at the time I’ve heard them, other than to think, wow, life really does suck compared to Heaven, doesn’t it?
It helps me to remember that our brains our wired for dopamine. We get a little hit of dopamine when we get that gold star, and when we get that carrot. Our brains are designed to become ACCUSTOMED to whatever level of pleasure we regularly experience, and then increase the threshold needed to release additional dopamine. That’s how addiction works. So much dopamine gets released that over time, the brain resets, and you need MORE pleasure/drugs/ Instagram likes to feel the same good feeling you’ve felt before. In fact, you feel NEGATIVE, and you feel worse, as your brain resets. Eventually, it take a certain amount of success to just feel NORMAL, not even particularly “good.”
And so when I’m feeling down, like today, I see a choice. I can look for ways to “pick myself up again,” run some more, and keep pushing, pushing, pushing, knowing that I’m never really going to be made happy by any outcome I achieve. Because that’s psychology.
Or I can accept that I feel terrible right now. Accept that it’s frustrating to not see the results I’d hoped for. Accept that I’m not Martha Stewart, or whatever other celebrity princess /influencer I feel like I’m aspiring to be at a given moment.
I can try, just try, to accept that life is hard, and that there is a lot of suffering it. Thinking that “everything happens for a reason” doesn’t really change that.
Is that depressing? If you can sit with it, really just sit with it, I bet you’ll feel your brain gets used to the low. And then you’ll see the roses, you’ll see the sky. You won’t need to check off any box on your list to feel the pleasure of being alive again.
And when the suffering hits again, allow yourself to feel it, rather than seeking to rid yourself of it, or even to “repent” of it (toxic thinking I’ve seen in some Christian circles). What’s the worst thing that pain can do to you? It can’t touch your soul.
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38-39 ESV
