I’ve been avoiding writing this the way the devil avoids the cross.
This has been overtaking my mind, and I realised it feels even more forceful if I try to resist it. So here I am.
I have been going through one of the hardest phases of my life. In the last couple of years, I went through an ADHD diagnosis after many misdiagnoses, a career transition, now a divorce, geographic displacement, grief for leaving my pets, a relationship, dreams, my house, my belongings behind — and a huge identity shift.
It’s a lot. A LOT.
No wonder I’ve been struggling so much with insomnia and my mental health for a while.
Right now I’m having more bad days than good days, and the fact that I’m not accepting how I’m dealing with it all is making it worse.
I’m not accepting the way I am, the pain I’m feeling, or the way I’m seeing my circumstances. I’m fighting against it and constantly telling myself how I should be, what I should do, what I should be focusing on. Irrationally comparing myself to people who I think would ride this big horse more smoothly than me. In short: I’m not respecting my time and my process.
Until I asked myself: what is the silver lining between accepting things as they are and changing the perspective to keep going? But what I quickly realised is that we don’t choose one thing or the other. Because both are parts of the healing process, the real question is — in which order do they come first?
I’m certainly experiencing that trying to force a change of perspective to see the bright side of the situation makes us feel even more miserable.
Sometimes the healthiest thing we can do when going through a hard time in our lives is simply to surrender to the pain. To really be there with it, feeling it all, no numbing, without any narrative of should be this or should be that, no judgement — just sit with the soreness of how life can suck immensely at times.
No self-help books, no beautifully written/good vibes/hopeful quotes, no inspiring reels, no drugs, no human therapy, no AI therapy, no seeking for answers and reasons. No NOTHING. Just pure surrender to what precisely is.
Be with it. Face it.
Because people normally say we need to focus on what we can control, but when we can’t control even the baseline of our physiology — like the lack of sleep — we can’t expect self-control over everything else. And on top of that, having a narrative of should this and should that in this situation can turn things into a bloody snowball.
It’s right here that we need to fuck off the common sense of — keep it positive, do the things that make you happy, get distracted, use drugs to numb it — and surrender to the rawness of the human condition: suffering.
Give yourself permission to suffer. That’s right. To feel it all. To scream. To rage it out. To fucking grieve it.
And I say give yourself permission because only YOU know your silver lining between acceptance and pretending everything is fine. Only you know when enough is enough.
And the most important part is this: if you have the courage to face your pain and feel it all — which is more difficult than “getting distracted” — know that you are one step closer to real healing. To process the pain without needing to rationalise it or fix it.
This is called “processing emotions.” This, apparently, is what functional human beings do. They fully accept their humanity first, so they stop projecting their insecurities onto other people.
And the more I think about this, the more I realise how much it’s a superhuman power. To know when and how to process emotions, without distractions and rationalisation.
We women seem to be particularly good at this — there’s something about how we move between feeling and articulating, between the body and the words for it. We can verbalise our emotions as much as feel them.
In other words, we know how to suffer better and harm less.
We know that the first step — and the hardest — of healing is accepting what we’re feeling without judgement, to feel the rawness of our emotions so we can turn them into clarity and lucidity.
Once we pass the acceptance stage — we are no longer controlled by our unprocessed emotions and their psychological and physical pain. We are ready to shift our perspective and move on.
Trusting your own process, your timing, and your grieving is where acceptance begins.
This is what I’m doing right now.
