10 Things I've Learned the Hard Way
“Remember that you are needed.
Remember that not all things are visible or provable. Love, faith, pain,
anxiety, depression, compassion… these aren’t always quantifiable. They aren’t
always measurable. They are often invisible. But they are real. And so are you.”
—Jenny Lawson, You Are Here: An Owner’s Manual for Dangerous Minds
1. Self-doubt, you ignorant slut
I’m going to let you in on a widely kept secret. Self-doubt—otherwise known as anxiety’s crazy sister—is a liar. She’s lying to you. The voices in your head are liars. The ones that say that you’re not doing enough? Liars. The ones that say you’ll never feel like enough? Liars. The ones that say you’ll never feel like enough unless you commit yourself ruthlessly to doing things outside of your comfort zone all in the name of satisfying what other people and society have told you your entire life you should be doing? The biggest goddamn liars I have ever met. But it’s also important to remember that self-doubt is natural. Without it, we’d never truly know what scares us and what doesn’t, where our comfort zone is and where it isn’t, and where our deeply rooted insecurities that have grown since childhood have come from. Sometimes it’s important to listen to these voices because, somewhere in the cloud of noise, they’re being realistic and trying to tell you what is right. Don’t ever lose touch of your gut feelings, no matter how intense the self-doubt has become. Sometimes she’s not lying, but most of the time, she is. For anyone who experiences self-doubt regularly, the voices are bound to quickly become big, fat-ass liars. The faster you realize that you are enough and have always been doing enough for that moment, the faster you will realize that the voices in your head are trying to destroy you. It’s always easier said than done to just not listen to them, but you always have to try your best not to. It’s so liberating when you can. Let go of that negativity—it’s giving you wrinkles. When you start to trust yourself as best you can, that’s when the voices will get quieter.
(Recommended listening: “Voices in My Head” by Ashley Tisdale and “Trust My Lonely” by Alessia Cara)
2. Friendship doesn’t always have to be forever
As an only child and introvert, I have always clung deeply to the friends I have felt a connection with, partly from the void created by not having any siblings, partly from never having been able to make friends very easily, and partly because—especially as I got older—there were only so many people I could actually stand to be around. As a result, I’ve always put too much pressure onto my friendships. Friends who ended up losing contact with me, whether purposely or otherwise, always felt like an actual breakup for me. I would start kicking myself for giving parts of myself that I don’t usually show to anyone to that person, and start telling myself that I needed to stop being so giving and outgoing with people who were not interested in staying friends with me for more than a given period of time. I believe there was some truth in what I would tell myself about being so giving and generous with people who would never return the favor, but it would become much easier and make friendship less stressful when I finally learned that friendship doesn’t have to be forever. It’s fine if you make a connection with someone and then you lose touch, especially when you’re young. People grow and people change, that’s just reality. It’s also fine if you remain friends with someone who you didn’t feel a connection with in the beginning—I’ve actually kept more friends that way than otherwise. Genuine human interaction has never been a strength of mine, so I’ve had to learn that most people don’t put such immense pressure around connections with people and maintaining friendship. All I got from that was a bunch of one-sided friendships with people who had clearly checked out of their relationship with me, but because I was too isolated to accept it, I kept contacting them in the hopes we could continue what we once had. One-sided friendships are not worth anyone’s time or energy. Friendship is a two-way street—end of story. It’s not worth your time to pursue a relationship with someone who is not even going to put a basic level of interest in spending time with you. Don’t waste your time trying to convince other people you’re worth spending time with. Sometimes it may only make you feel more isolated, but other times it allows room for real friends to work their way into your life. Everything happens for a reason, so don’t waste time trying to force a puzzle piece where it doesn’t fit. Life is too short. I like to believe that people are trying their best with what they are given. I have to believe that, for my soul. But someone’s best may not be good enough for you, and that’s completely fine. Their best can still bring you pain. You can forgive them and walk away. You can do both. But also, in terms of holding grudges against people for whatever the reason may be, I’d like to point out that letting go of anger and bitterness towards people is so much easier said than done. People mean well when they say you should forgive and forget, but you’re allowed to acknowledge that your anger and bitterness is/was justified. Too often I find we are rushed into forgiving people “for our own sake” and we lose sight of validating our own hurt feelings. I hate when friends, family, or even my therapist tells me to let go of bitterness and anger. I deserved them. I earned them. But for some, the anger can obviously be very unhelpful, and even harmful. You can acknowledge the anger you deserve to feel, and then let it go when you are ready. You can do both.
(Recommended listening: “Real Friends” by Camila Cabello and “RIP” by Olivia O’Brien)
3. Never underestimate the power of a smile
Look. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I practically invented Resting Bitch Face. My natural and neutral facial expression looks like I am angry or grumpy, or both. Ask anyone who has ever worked with me and they will very quickly agree. It’s just my face. Always has been. My mom used to get mad at me when I was little for how my forced smile would turn out in pictures. I just never grasped the concept of smiling when you didn’t feel like it. When I felt like smiling, I would smile. Otherwise, I retained my natural expression—which I’ve been told is something like a look of death (which I’m honestly not opposed to; I’d rather people think I’m mean and bitter—because I definitely can be—and then find out that the cover is not the book later on. Don’t judge by appearances). If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I look better when I smile, or I should smile more often, or stop frowning, you have every reason to smile—I would be a very rich person. Our world and society is something of a smile factory, which not only recommends smiling and happiness, but demands it. If you’re not smiling, you won’t seem approachable, and no one is going to hire you. If you’re not smiling because you’re feeling down, it’s your own problem because there are plenty of things to smile about. These are messages that are deeply ingrained into our society and culture because no one likes the alternative—no one wants to admit that reality is awful and soul-crushing because then everyone would be depressed. It’s much easier to live in a state of blissful happiness and smiles that then makes you warm, approachable, lively, and outgoing, than it is to live in a state of bitterness and hatred for everything. But what this ideology fails to take into account is that happiness and smiles all the time is not realistic—people are allowed to be sad, angry, or any other emotion that isn’t happy. The smile factory not only demands happiness for the sake of productivity but also leads everyone to believe that sadness and depression are unnatural, thus stigmatizing the topic of mental health even further. You’re allowed to substitute other emotions for happiness if that’s what you feel inside. But as much as I believe all of this to be true, when you are feeling sad or depressed, finding genuine reasons to smile—real smiling—makes a world of difference, because the alternative really isn’t pretty. When you can find reasons to smile, even when you don’t truly feel like it, you are trying your hardest to bring yourself out of a dark hole of sadness that, frankly, is the worst place you can be. I still like to be bitter or hateful for no reason sometimes, that’s just my personality, but when you cross the line into real sadness and depression, you really do have to find individual reasons to smile. Being bitter and hateful for no reason while also genuinely depressed doesn’t work. You really have to find ways to make yourself happy and smiling, even just for a short while, because real happiness and smiles will always be better than fake ones.
(Recommended listening: “Rainbow” by Kesha, “Smile” by Avril Lavigne, and “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)” by Judy Garland)
4. It’s okay to not be okay
God, I wish I could climb a mountain and shout this at the very top of my lungs. I wish I had both learned and accepted that it’s okay not to be okay so much sooner, because it would have saved me so much turmoil and about half a dozen emotional breakdowns. Because emotions like depression and sadness have been historically stigmatized along with the rest of mental health, we are led to believe that they are unnatural. We shouldn’t be sad because there are plenty of reasons to be happy. I shouldn’t be depressed because I’m doing everything I ever thought I was supposed to do, so I should be fine. I should be happy. So many unrealistic expectations have been internalized into so many of us that we don’t understand why doing ‘what we’re supposed to be doing’ makes us feel depressed. Not to mention that when you are feeling depressed, it’s not a fun place to be, so our natural reaction is to immediately try our best to not feel like that any more. It’s in our nature to try our very hardest to feel happy instead of depressed; that’s just how humans have come to be wired. But it would save us all so much time and trouble if we learned quicker that it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to feel shitty. It’s okay to have a bad day. It’s okay to feel like an anxious mess. Tomorrow is another day, and it’s fine to write off today as shitty. We try so hard to avoid accepting that we’re feeling sad or depressed because we’ve been taught that there are countless ways to avoid falling into that black hole. But at one point or another, you may find yourself having fallen into that dark, black hole and realize that you are completely untrained on how to bring yourself out of it. Lesson one: it’s okay to not be okay! Accept that you’re feeling shitty. Ask yourself why, but don’t put too much pressure around the question of why if it stresses you out. Just accept that you are feeling down and that the sad face isn’t going to go away that easy. Bad days might even become good days when you can finally let yourself accept that having a bad day is fine, natural, and normal. Lesson two: be kind to yourself. Sometimes that’s the most selfless thing you can do when you’re feeling this way. Otherwise you are going to start making demands of yourself that your body and brain aren’t equipped to deal with right now, and it will make you feel worse. Bask in the distress, and live in the mess, especially when you’re feeling like this. It’s how you’re really going to get to know yourself and figure out what you need—no one else—to survive.
(Recommended listening: “Sad” by Bebe Rexha, “Not Today” by Alessia Cara, “Big Girls Cry” by Sia, “A Little Work” by Fergie, and “Skyscraper” by Demi Lovato)
5. Don’t compare yourself to others
Keep your eyes on your own paper. I know how much easier said than done it is to not compare yourself to others, especially when you’re young and everyone wants different things despite everyone being under the impression that we’re all in the same boat. News flash: we’re not. There are so many different roads you can take in this life, and all of them are perfectly fine. I wish high school teachers and principals weren’t so caught up in their ‘stay in school’ narrative, because as much as I understand why that’s important, it should be just as important to teach kids how big the world really is. I know some kids have already grown up too fast and end up learning this for themselves, but for the ones who have always stayed in their lane and always been attentive listeners to ‘what you should be doing,’ learning that everyone is different and you don’t have to be like everyone else would go a long way. Not to say that kids don’t already learn that individuality is important, being different is an asset, and you really don’t have to be like everyone else, but when you’re young, those things are so scary. For me, it felt like all the adults in my life immediately expected me to have already learned these things and to automatically know it was fine to follow my own path. I feel like I did know it somewhere within myself, but I was too young and immature to fully realize it. You cling to the people around you because you’re nowhere near ready to accept that everyone has to be their own human being, and that comparing yourself to even your closest friend in the world isn’t realistic and won’t accomplish anything but more self-doubt. It’s in our nature to compare ourselves to others, even as fully grown adults, because we automatically don’t want to feel alone. But that feeling of being alone is what you have to learn to cling to, because going down that road is what is going to lead to you who you really want to be.
(Recommended listening: “Love Myself” by Olivia O’Brien and “Trust My Lonely” by Alessia Cara)
6. You don’t owe anybody anything
Okay, sure: you owe your family and friends a certain amount of love, respect, and courtesy, and you owe your employer two weeks notice if you intend to quit. But if you’re at a party and you want to leave? Leave. Any social interaction that is making you more anxious than you ever wanted to be when you left the house that day? Get out. You’re reading a book you really aren’t enjoying? Stop reading it. Start reading something you will enjoy. You’re watching something boring or stupid and could be watching something better? Turn it off. You really don’t owe anybody anything. You owe it to yourself to spend your time wisely, because life is too damn short. It’s also important to remember to apply this rule when you are working for free, when you feel obligated to do something for someone who has been nothing but demanding, or when you feel someone is taking advantage of your generosity or kindness. Feeling like you’ve been walked all over and knowing that you let it happen is, hands down, one of the worst feelings you will ever experience. Especially once you’ve acquired your own fair share of adult responsibilities, you have to know how and where you’re going to spend your energy. You don’t want to collapse from doing too much for something that isn’t going to end up being worth it. You need to take care of your body and your brain. For me, it was an interesting transition to go from a teenager whose only real responsibility was school and who thus had plenty of free time to help other adults who asked for it, and then start to grow into an adult who has his own adult responsibilities to devote himself to and can thus learn to feel fine in saying no sometimes. Especially when you know the people who usually ask you for something are people who will have no shame in continuing to come back to you until you learn where to draw the line. Bitch, please. You owe them nothing.
(Recommended listening: “Human” by Christina Perri and “I Have Questions” by Camila Cabello)
7. Failure is normal and it doesn’t have to be perfect
As I’ve already explained, I am a lifelong perfectionist who has only started to recently accept that failure is natural. Even after I failed again and again and again, for years I internalized the feeling I felt when I failed at something and told myself it could never happen again. Usually, in order to maintain that it never happened again, I would develop or adopt some sort of obsessive compulsive behavior in order to ensure that said failure would never occur again. But guess what? Those compulsive ticks and anxiety rituals accomplished nothing. Sure, they made me feel safe and comforted from time to time, but I know enough now to know that it wasn’t real safety or comfort—just more magical thinking. From where I stand now, I know it’s important to not trust a person who believes they’ve never failed at something. Failure makes you stronger, wiser, and more resilient. It implies that you’ve been through some shit and are standing here nonetheless to prove that you’re still here. When you grow up anxious and so obsessed with perfection, it’s so liberating to look around once in awhile and realize that despite everything that’s ever happened, you’re still here. You’re alive. You once felt so down and so dark and couldn’t remember what it felt like to feel anything else, and now you’re having a moment where you’re realizing all the things you fail to notice when you’re living in that dark place inside your head. Failure is how you learn to grow. It’s how you learn to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going—a vital part of life. Perfect people and perfect things don’t exist. Perfection is a myth. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, and it’s going to be fine. Yes, a lot of the time, things don’t work out the way you wanted them to. But goddamn it, at least you tried.
(Recommended listening: “I’m Still Here” by Sia, “At My Best” by Machine Gun Kelly & Hailee Steinfeld, “Alive” by Sia, and “Strong” by Sonna Rele)
8. You’re never alone
I know people say this all the time when they tell you that they’re there for you, but it’s a completely different journey to realizing it for yourself. There have been times where, now accepting of my new reality of being unable to compare myself to others and being on my own road for what feels like the first time ever, I have felt overwhelmingly alone. It’s such a degrading feeling when you look around and realize that there’s nobody else who thinks the way you do, worries the way you do, or is doing the same thing as you are. Hats off to you if you’ve found a tribe of people that are similar to you in all these ways, but it’s important to know that it’s okay if you’re always by yourself for it, because you’re never truly alone. Talk to a parent, friend, or a therapist, if you can attain one. Don’t be ashamed to ask for help—these are all universal struggles everyone who has ever lived has gone through, believe me. Asking for help makes you stronger than not asking for help. Also, being vulnerable is not being weak. It takes immense courage to be vulnerable. It’s definitely much easier not to be. You are not weak for expressing your feelings, asking for what you need, or opening up to someone. You can’t control what they do with it, but you are far from weak. Read books either about what you’re feeling, or with fictional characters going through similar things as you. Watch a television show or movie that you have always related to, even childhood movies. I can guarantee that it will make you feel less alone, even just for a short while. Because as much as it sucks to feel overwhelmed by life and to feel like you have no one else around you who is in the exact same boat, somewhere down the line, you’re going to realize that you are fine figuring it out on your own. For me, things have always come into focus when I’ve figured them out for myself. No one else is going to solve your problems. You are in the driver’s seat, figuratively and literally, and sooner or later you’re going to have to take the wheel, so you need to figure out what you need to make you feel less alone while you’re doing it. Because one way or another, when you are ready to realize it, you’re never really alone.
(Recommended listening: “I’ll Be There” by Jess Glynne and “Today Is Your Day” by Shania Twain)
9. Give your gut feelings more credit and have trust in what you think
Like I said, in the crowded noise of your self-doubt, those voices are trying to signal to you that they know who you are and what you are capable of, and vice versa. It’s such an empty feeling when you feel like you can no longer trust your gut feelings because you think that the voices in your head are against you. But in somewhat of an ironic twist, you also have to figure out how to trust your gut when it comes to listening to those voices. Most of the time, we don’t actually need advice. We just need someone to listen to us while they confirm or validate what we already know and the choices we’ve already made. Give your gut feelings more credit. Try to remember what it was like to trust your gut before the voices in your head started making you think otherwise. Have trust in what you think. Resurrect your flight or fight instinct. If you’re really not comfortable and don’t see a given situation being worth what you need it to be, leave. If you think you are comfortable but still feel plagued by self-doubt, remind yourself that you are a badass motherfucker who is going to try their best to be up for the challenge. You’re not an idiot, and if you are being an idiot, rest assured that we’ve all acted like idiots and had to clean up the mess from going against our instincts.
(Recommended listening: “Let Me Live” by Kehlani and “Breathin” by Ariana Grande)
10. Nobody cares and it’s really not that deep
When you are someone who is not incredibly skilled at human interaction, is anxious, and prefer to spend time alone, you tend to spend a lot of time practicing social interactions. You rehearse phone calls before you make them (unless you can avoid making them altogether). You don’t feel like going to that new takeout restaurant tonight because you’re not sure how the lineup or ordering process works and don’t have the energy to figure it out on the spot. Job interviews make you want to step out of your skin and tear yourself to pieces. I’ve always cared about things immensely. Things that matter, things that don’t matter. If I’m going to do something, I’m not only going to give all of myself but I’m also going to care about it. At once a frustrating feeling to realize that no one else cares as much as you about such mundane things, it then becomes incredibly liberating when you accept that honestly nobody does. It’s not that deep. You might put so much thought and effort into making a connection and friendship, but others don’t. You might be so obsessed with perfection that a smudge on the top of your assignment causes you to print all of it over again, but your teacher probably wouldn’t notice or care in the least. No one is sitting around dissecting that thing you did or that thing you said, unless it was grossly inappropriate or out of bounds. No one is stalking your social media because of the way you said hi to them that time at the pharmacy. Free yourself of the burden that other people care about your every action and word. Free yourself of the notion that someone has made you the shitty supporting character in their life, because they really haven’t. They’re too worried about their own lives and their own interactions with the woman at the grocery store to think for more than thirty seconds about a potentially awkward interaction with you. Something I repeat to myself when I need to be reminded that nobody cares that much, and that I’m the only one who’s worried about it, is a line from the highly acclaimed television comedy Schitt’s Creek. In a second season episode where David (Dan Levy) is attempting to obtain his driver’s license and is stressing out so much about what the instructor will think of him if he drives a certain way, his sister Alexis (Annie Murphy) keeps telling him, “Nobody cares, David.” Because they don’t! The instructor ends up being on his phone for most of David’s driving test and truly does not give a shit. If you are like me and David, try to free yourself of the unbearable burden of caring about what other people will think. For me, it’s not so much that I care exactly what they think of me, but it’s that I care what I think of me. I hold myself to impossibly high standards, and it’s time to take it down a notch. Nobody cares that much, and it’s really not that deep. This has become my mantra and I hope it can become yours, too.
(Recommended listening: “What the Hell” by Avril Lavigne and “All That Matters” by Christina Perri)
“What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try and control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you to just live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world.”
—Joan Didion
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given to me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to tear you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling…”
—Aldous Huxley
Follow It's Not That Deep on Instagram — @areyouthereanxiety — and listen to my playlist of mental health songs on Spotify and Apple Music
—Jenny Lawson, You Are Here: An Owner’s Manual for Dangerous Minds
1. Self-doubt, you ignorant slut
I’m going to let you in on a widely kept secret. Self-doubt—otherwise known as anxiety’s crazy sister—is a liar. She’s lying to you. The voices in your head are liars. The ones that say that you’re not doing enough? Liars. The ones that say you’ll never feel like enough? Liars. The ones that say you’ll never feel like enough unless you commit yourself ruthlessly to doing things outside of your comfort zone all in the name of satisfying what other people and society have told you your entire life you should be doing? The biggest goddamn liars I have ever met. But it’s also important to remember that self-doubt is natural. Without it, we’d never truly know what scares us and what doesn’t, where our comfort zone is and where it isn’t, and where our deeply rooted insecurities that have grown since childhood have come from. Sometimes it’s important to listen to these voices because, somewhere in the cloud of noise, they’re being realistic and trying to tell you what is right. Don’t ever lose touch of your gut feelings, no matter how intense the self-doubt has become. Sometimes she’s not lying, but most of the time, she is. For anyone who experiences self-doubt regularly, the voices are bound to quickly become big, fat-ass liars. The faster you realize that you are enough and have always been doing enough for that moment, the faster you will realize that the voices in your head are trying to destroy you. It’s always easier said than done to just not listen to them, but you always have to try your best not to. It’s so liberating when you can. Let go of that negativity—it’s giving you wrinkles. When you start to trust yourself as best you can, that’s when the voices will get quieter.
(Recommended listening: “Voices in My Head” by Ashley Tisdale and “Trust My Lonely” by Alessia Cara)
2. Friendship doesn’t always have to be forever
As an only child and introvert, I have always clung deeply to the friends I have felt a connection with, partly from the void created by not having any siblings, partly from never having been able to make friends very easily, and partly because—especially as I got older—there were only so many people I could actually stand to be around. As a result, I’ve always put too much pressure onto my friendships. Friends who ended up losing contact with me, whether purposely or otherwise, always felt like an actual breakup for me. I would start kicking myself for giving parts of myself that I don’t usually show to anyone to that person, and start telling myself that I needed to stop being so giving and outgoing with people who were not interested in staying friends with me for more than a given period of time. I believe there was some truth in what I would tell myself about being so giving and generous with people who would never return the favor, but it would become much easier and make friendship less stressful when I finally learned that friendship doesn’t have to be forever. It’s fine if you make a connection with someone and then you lose touch, especially when you’re young. People grow and people change, that’s just reality. It’s also fine if you remain friends with someone who you didn’t feel a connection with in the beginning—I’ve actually kept more friends that way than otherwise. Genuine human interaction has never been a strength of mine, so I’ve had to learn that most people don’t put such immense pressure around connections with people and maintaining friendship. All I got from that was a bunch of one-sided friendships with people who had clearly checked out of their relationship with me, but because I was too isolated to accept it, I kept contacting them in the hopes we could continue what we once had. One-sided friendships are not worth anyone’s time or energy. Friendship is a two-way street—end of story. It’s not worth your time to pursue a relationship with someone who is not even going to put a basic level of interest in spending time with you. Don’t waste your time trying to convince other people you’re worth spending time with. Sometimes it may only make you feel more isolated, but other times it allows room for real friends to work their way into your life. Everything happens for a reason, so don’t waste time trying to force a puzzle piece where it doesn’t fit. Life is too short. I like to believe that people are trying their best with what they are given. I have to believe that, for my soul. But someone’s best may not be good enough for you, and that’s completely fine. Their best can still bring you pain. You can forgive them and walk away. You can do both. But also, in terms of holding grudges against people for whatever the reason may be, I’d like to point out that letting go of anger and bitterness towards people is so much easier said than done. People mean well when they say you should forgive and forget, but you’re allowed to acknowledge that your anger and bitterness is/was justified. Too often I find we are rushed into forgiving people “for our own sake” and we lose sight of validating our own hurt feelings. I hate when friends, family, or even my therapist tells me to let go of bitterness and anger. I deserved them. I earned them. But for some, the anger can obviously be very unhelpful, and even harmful. You can acknowledge the anger you deserve to feel, and then let it go when you are ready. You can do both.
(Recommended listening: “Real Friends” by Camila Cabello and “RIP” by Olivia O’Brien)
3. Never underestimate the power of a smile
Look. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I practically invented Resting Bitch Face. My natural and neutral facial expression looks like I am angry or grumpy, or both. Ask anyone who has ever worked with me and they will very quickly agree. It’s just my face. Always has been. My mom used to get mad at me when I was little for how my forced smile would turn out in pictures. I just never grasped the concept of smiling when you didn’t feel like it. When I felt like smiling, I would smile. Otherwise, I retained my natural expression—which I’ve been told is something like a look of death (which I’m honestly not opposed to; I’d rather people think I’m mean and bitter—because I definitely can be—and then find out that the cover is not the book later on. Don’t judge by appearances). If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I look better when I smile, or I should smile more often, or stop frowning, you have every reason to smile—I would be a very rich person. Our world and society is something of a smile factory, which not only recommends smiling and happiness, but demands it. If you’re not smiling, you won’t seem approachable, and no one is going to hire you. If you’re not smiling because you’re feeling down, it’s your own problem because there are plenty of things to smile about. These are messages that are deeply ingrained into our society and culture because no one likes the alternative—no one wants to admit that reality is awful and soul-crushing because then everyone would be depressed. It’s much easier to live in a state of blissful happiness and smiles that then makes you warm, approachable, lively, and outgoing, than it is to live in a state of bitterness and hatred for everything. But what this ideology fails to take into account is that happiness and smiles all the time is not realistic—people are allowed to be sad, angry, or any other emotion that isn’t happy. The smile factory not only demands happiness for the sake of productivity but also leads everyone to believe that sadness and depression are unnatural, thus stigmatizing the topic of mental health even further. You’re allowed to substitute other emotions for happiness if that’s what you feel inside. But as much as I believe all of this to be true, when you are feeling sad or depressed, finding genuine reasons to smile—real smiling—makes a world of difference, because the alternative really isn’t pretty. When you can find reasons to smile, even when you don’t truly feel like it, you are trying your hardest to bring yourself out of a dark hole of sadness that, frankly, is the worst place you can be. I still like to be bitter or hateful for no reason sometimes, that’s just my personality, but when you cross the line into real sadness and depression, you really do have to find individual reasons to smile. Being bitter and hateful for no reason while also genuinely depressed doesn’t work. You really have to find ways to make yourself happy and smiling, even just for a short while, because real happiness and smiles will always be better than fake ones.
(Recommended listening: “Rainbow” by Kesha, “Smile” by Avril Lavigne, and “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)” by Judy Garland)
4. It’s okay to not be okay
God, I wish I could climb a mountain and shout this at the very top of my lungs. I wish I had both learned and accepted that it’s okay not to be okay so much sooner, because it would have saved me so much turmoil and about half a dozen emotional breakdowns. Because emotions like depression and sadness have been historically stigmatized along with the rest of mental health, we are led to believe that they are unnatural. We shouldn’t be sad because there are plenty of reasons to be happy. I shouldn’t be depressed because I’m doing everything I ever thought I was supposed to do, so I should be fine. I should be happy. So many unrealistic expectations have been internalized into so many of us that we don’t understand why doing ‘what we’re supposed to be doing’ makes us feel depressed. Not to mention that when you are feeling depressed, it’s not a fun place to be, so our natural reaction is to immediately try our best to not feel like that any more. It’s in our nature to try our very hardest to feel happy instead of depressed; that’s just how humans have come to be wired. But it would save us all so much time and trouble if we learned quicker that it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to feel shitty. It’s okay to have a bad day. It’s okay to feel like an anxious mess. Tomorrow is another day, and it’s fine to write off today as shitty. We try so hard to avoid accepting that we’re feeling sad or depressed because we’ve been taught that there are countless ways to avoid falling into that black hole. But at one point or another, you may find yourself having fallen into that dark, black hole and realize that you are completely untrained on how to bring yourself out of it. Lesson one: it’s okay to not be okay! Accept that you’re feeling shitty. Ask yourself why, but don’t put too much pressure around the question of why if it stresses you out. Just accept that you are feeling down and that the sad face isn’t going to go away that easy. Bad days might even become good days when you can finally let yourself accept that having a bad day is fine, natural, and normal. Lesson two: be kind to yourself. Sometimes that’s the most selfless thing you can do when you’re feeling this way. Otherwise you are going to start making demands of yourself that your body and brain aren’t equipped to deal with right now, and it will make you feel worse. Bask in the distress, and live in the mess, especially when you’re feeling like this. It’s how you’re really going to get to know yourself and figure out what you need—no one else—to survive.
(Recommended listening: “Sad” by Bebe Rexha, “Not Today” by Alessia Cara, “Big Girls Cry” by Sia, “A Little Work” by Fergie, and “Skyscraper” by Demi Lovato)
5. Don’t compare yourself to others
Keep your eyes on your own paper. I know how much easier said than done it is to not compare yourself to others, especially when you’re young and everyone wants different things despite everyone being under the impression that we’re all in the same boat. News flash: we’re not. There are so many different roads you can take in this life, and all of them are perfectly fine. I wish high school teachers and principals weren’t so caught up in their ‘stay in school’ narrative, because as much as I understand why that’s important, it should be just as important to teach kids how big the world really is. I know some kids have already grown up too fast and end up learning this for themselves, but for the ones who have always stayed in their lane and always been attentive listeners to ‘what you should be doing,’ learning that everyone is different and you don’t have to be like everyone else would go a long way. Not to say that kids don’t already learn that individuality is important, being different is an asset, and you really don’t have to be like everyone else, but when you’re young, those things are so scary. For me, it felt like all the adults in my life immediately expected me to have already learned these things and to automatically know it was fine to follow my own path. I feel like I did know it somewhere within myself, but I was too young and immature to fully realize it. You cling to the people around you because you’re nowhere near ready to accept that everyone has to be their own human being, and that comparing yourself to even your closest friend in the world isn’t realistic and won’t accomplish anything but more self-doubt. It’s in our nature to compare ourselves to others, even as fully grown adults, because we automatically don’t want to feel alone. But that feeling of being alone is what you have to learn to cling to, because going down that road is what is going to lead to you who you really want to be.
(Recommended listening: “Love Myself” by Olivia O’Brien and “Trust My Lonely” by Alessia Cara)
6. You don’t owe anybody anything
Okay, sure: you owe your family and friends a certain amount of love, respect, and courtesy, and you owe your employer two weeks notice if you intend to quit. But if you’re at a party and you want to leave? Leave. Any social interaction that is making you more anxious than you ever wanted to be when you left the house that day? Get out. You’re reading a book you really aren’t enjoying? Stop reading it. Start reading something you will enjoy. You’re watching something boring or stupid and could be watching something better? Turn it off. You really don’t owe anybody anything. You owe it to yourself to spend your time wisely, because life is too damn short. It’s also important to remember to apply this rule when you are working for free, when you feel obligated to do something for someone who has been nothing but demanding, or when you feel someone is taking advantage of your generosity or kindness. Feeling like you’ve been walked all over and knowing that you let it happen is, hands down, one of the worst feelings you will ever experience. Especially once you’ve acquired your own fair share of adult responsibilities, you have to know how and where you’re going to spend your energy. You don’t want to collapse from doing too much for something that isn’t going to end up being worth it. You need to take care of your body and your brain. For me, it was an interesting transition to go from a teenager whose only real responsibility was school and who thus had plenty of free time to help other adults who asked for it, and then start to grow into an adult who has his own adult responsibilities to devote himself to and can thus learn to feel fine in saying no sometimes. Especially when you know the people who usually ask you for something are people who will have no shame in continuing to come back to you until you learn where to draw the line. Bitch, please. You owe them nothing.
(Recommended listening: “Human” by Christina Perri and “I Have Questions” by Camila Cabello)
7. Failure is normal and it doesn’t have to be perfect
As I’ve already explained, I am a lifelong perfectionist who has only started to recently accept that failure is natural. Even after I failed again and again and again, for years I internalized the feeling I felt when I failed at something and told myself it could never happen again. Usually, in order to maintain that it never happened again, I would develop or adopt some sort of obsessive compulsive behavior in order to ensure that said failure would never occur again. But guess what? Those compulsive ticks and anxiety rituals accomplished nothing. Sure, they made me feel safe and comforted from time to time, but I know enough now to know that it wasn’t real safety or comfort—just more magical thinking. From where I stand now, I know it’s important to not trust a person who believes they’ve never failed at something. Failure makes you stronger, wiser, and more resilient. It implies that you’ve been through some shit and are standing here nonetheless to prove that you’re still here. When you grow up anxious and so obsessed with perfection, it’s so liberating to look around once in awhile and realize that despite everything that’s ever happened, you’re still here. You’re alive. You once felt so down and so dark and couldn’t remember what it felt like to feel anything else, and now you’re having a moment where you’re realizing all the things you fail to notice when you’re living in that dark place inside your head. Failure is how you learn to grow. It’s how you learn to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going—a vital part of life. Perfect people and perfect things don’t exist. Perfection is a myth. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, and it’s going to be fine. Yes, a lot of the time, things don’t work out the way you wanted them to. But goddamn it, at least you tried.
(Recommended listening: “I’m Still Here” by Sia, “At My Best” by Machine Gun Kelly & Hailee Steinfeld, “Alive” by Sia, and “Strong” by Sonna Rele)
8. You’re never alone
I know people say this all the time when they tell you that they’re there for you, but it’s a completely different journey to realizing it for yourself. There have been times where, now accepting of my new reality of being unable to compare myself to others and being on my own road for what feels like the first time ever, I have felt overwhelmingly alone. It’s such a degrading feeling when you look around and realize that there’s nobody else who thinks the way you do, worries the way you do, or is doing the same thing as you are. Hats off to you if you’ve found a tribe of people that are similar to you in all these ways, but it’s important to know that it’s okay if you’re always by yourself for it, because you’re never truly alone. Talk to a parent, friend, or a therapist, if you can attain one. Don’t be ashamed to ask for help—these are all universal struggles everyone who has ever lived has gone through, believe me. Asking for help makes you stronger than not asking for help. Also, being vulnerable is not being weak. It takes immense courage to be vulnerable. It’s definitely much easier not to be. You are not weak for expressing your feelings, asking for what you need, or opening up to someone. You can’t control what they do with it, but you are far from weak. Read books either about what you’re feeling, or with fictional characters going through similar things as you. Watch a television show or movie that you have always related to, even childhood movies. I can guarantee that it will make you feel less alone, even just for a short while. Because as much as it sucks to feel overwhelmed by life and to feel like you have no one else around you who is in the exact same boat, somewhere down the line, you’re going to realize that you are fine figuring it out on your own. For me, things have always come into focus when I’ve figured them out for myself. No one else is going to solve your problems. You are in the driver’s seat, figuratively and literally, and sooner or later you’re going to have to take the wheel, so you need to figure out what you need to make you feel less alone while you’re doing it. Because one way or another, when you are ready to realize it, you’re never really alone.
(Recommended listening: “I’ll Be There” by Jess Glynne and “Today Is Your Day” by Shania Twain)
9. Give your gut feelings more credit and have trust in what you think
Like I said, in the crowded noise of your self-doubt, those voices are trying to signal to you that they know who you are and what you are capable of, and vice versa. It’s such an empty feeling when you feel like you can no longer trust your gut feelings because you think that the voices in your head are against you. But in somewhat of an ironic twist, you also have to figure out how to trust your gut when it comes to listening to those voices. Most of the time, we don’t actually need advice. We just need someone to listen to us while they confirm or validate what we already know and the choices we’ve already made. Give your gut feelings more credit. Try to remember what it was like to trust your gut before the voices in your head started making you think otherwise. Have trust in what you think. Resurrect your flight or fight instinct. If you’re really not comfortable and don’t see a given situation being worth what you need it to be, leave. If you think you are comfortable but still feel plagued by self-doubt, remind yourself that you are a badass motherfucker who is going to try their best to be up for the challenge. You’re not an idiot, and if you are being an idiot, rest assured that we’ve all acted like idiots and had to clean up the mess from going against our instincts.
(Recommended listening: “Let Me Live” by Kehlani and “Breathin” by Ariana Grande)
10. Nobody cares and it’s really not that deep
When you are someone who is not incredibly skilled at human interaction, is anxious, and prefer to spend time alone, you tend to spend a lot of time practicing social interactions. You rehearse phone calls before you make them (unless you can avoid making them altogether). You don’t feel like going to that new takeout restaurant tonight because you’re not sure how the lineup or ordering process works and don’t have the energy to figure it out on the spot. Job interviews make you want to step out of your skin and tear yourself to pieces. I’ve always cared about things immensely. Things that matter, things that don’t matter. If I’m going to do something, I’m not only going to give all of myself but I’m also going to care about it. At once a frustrating feeling to realize that no one else cares as much as you about such mundane things, it then becomes incredibly liberating when you accept that honestly nobody does. It’s not that deep. You might put so much thought and effort into making a connection and friendship, but others don’t. You might be so obsessed with perfection that a smudge on the top of your assignment causes you to print all of it over again, but your teacher probably wouldn’t notice or care in the least. No one is sitting around dissecting that thing you did or that thing you said, unless it was grossly inappropriate or out of bounds. No one is stalking your social media because of the way you said hi to them that time at the pharmacy. Free yourself of the burden that other people care about your every action and word. Free yourself of the notion that someone has made you the shitty supporting character in their life, because they really haven’t. They’re too worried about their own lives and their own interactions with the woman at the grocery store to think for more than thirty seconds about a potentially awkward interaction with you. Something I repeat to myself when I need to be reminded that nobody cares that much, and that I’m the only one who’s worried about it, is a line from the highly acclaimed television comedy Schitt’s Creek. In a second season episode where David (Dan Levy) is attempting to obtain his driver’s license and is stressing out so much about what the instructor will think of him if he drives a certain way, his sister Alexis (Annie Murphy) keeps telling him, “Nobody cares, David.” Because they don’t! The instructor ends up being on his phone for most of David’s driving test and truly does not give a shit. If you are like me and David, try to free yourself of the unbearable burden of caring about what other people will think. For me, it’s not so much that I care exactly what they think of me, but it’s that I care what I think of me. I hold myself to impossibly high standards, and it’s time to take it down a notch. Nobody cares that much, and it’s really not that deep. This has become my mantra and I hope it can become yours, too.
(Recommended listening: “What the Hell” by Avril Lavigne and “All That Matters” by Christina Perri)
“What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try and control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you to just live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world.”
—Joan Didion
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given to me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to tear you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling…”
—Aldous Huxley
Follow It's Not That Deep on Instagram — @areyouthereanxiety — and listen to my playlist of mental health songs on Spotify and Apple Music
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