Ugh. Negative feelings are gross.

I’m an Enneagram type 7 meaning I really enjoy experiences, doing fun things and in general I will do almost anything to avoid feeling pain or negative feelings. I learned during my marriage that I didn’t deal well with negative emotions coming off of my ex husband. If he felt anything other than joy and excitement I panicked. The thing about long term relationships is that if you let them, they’ll show you who you really are like one of those close up mirrors you use to examine your pores or pluck out your eyebrow hair. At the time, I logically knew that the person I lived with had negative feelings like any other human, but internally I was like “I’m happy all of the time! Always! See!”

That, my friends, was an epic lie.

Reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle reminded me that life isn’t actually supposed to be sunshine and roses. And while my life has been anything but those two things, I have managed to keep it together. I genuinely do have a default cheery disposition. I carry myself in a way that suggests I allow things to roll off my back and sometimes I do. But I recently, as in within the past year in action and within the past month in practice, have allowed myself to be openly angry, sad, frustrated, annoyed and downright grumpy. And you know what? It feels really freeing.

Want to cry on the stairs on the way down to the kitchen because you forgot something in the bedroom and because birthdays are weirdly sad days now and your partner is annoying and you were already hanging on by a thread before you realized you forgot your water glass on your bedside table? Go for it. Your body is telling you to cry, so cry. If you don’t, that feeling will creep up somewhere else in a weird and possibly damaging way and bite you very hard in the ass when you least expect it. Like in the middle of a Zoom meeting or maybe you find yourself frustrated for no reason while you’re walking the dog, rushing him to poop faster because you want to get back inside to do more nothing and you’re on a time schedule. Imagine someone watching and rushing you while you tried to find a good spot to have a poo. No one wants that.

Nicole Sachs, the therapist behind “The Cure for Chronic Pain” podcast talks about receiving anxiety by imagining you’re on a very safe raft in the middle of an ocean and you’re watching a huge, intimidating wave come your way. There’s nothing you can do about the wave, it’s coming whether you like it or not. You can however, hold on to your raft breathe deeply and ride the wave from start to finish. It’s funny how we try to wiggle out of it. We get near the crest of the wave and decide we’re done because it’s too hard. Then we try to paddle wildly in any direction to get out of the situation, exhausting ourselves and inevitably failing because waves are waves and are only stopped when they come to their natural conclusion and the ocean settles. The ocean always settles which means you will, too.

Or we numb ourself while we’re on our raft and then we don’t even get to experience the wave, we’re just drunk on a raft eating cake and watching Netflix and are therefore not getting any practice in both experiencing the wave itself, and riding it out with clarity. When the next wave inevitably comes, there we are: unprepared and maybe still drunk or perhaps not drunk but wearing some new lounge clothing that Instagram told us to buy while we were distracting ourselves from the last wave we felt.

So yes, negative feelings are gross. Yucky. Unpleasant. But useful. Oh so useful. Why are you feeling the anxiety in the first place? Did something trigger you? Did you see something on Instagram that made you think you were inadequate? Did you scroll through LinkedIn, the silent killer, and see that your nemesis was just promoted to VP of Something Special and you feel like you’re toiling away on menial labor (when in fact you’re a force of nature in your own right and no one seems to notice!)? Scanning your body helps. Knowing that everything we’re looking at all day is a tiny sliver of the world helps, but in general being able to breathe, hold on, and ride the waves is the only way to get through any of it.

Enjoy a good cry on the stairs. Walk the dog and don’t rush him to poop. You might not be happier for it, but there’s a chance you uncover inner joy slowly slowly.