Being a Human Being

We are all holding Heavy Stuff

Source: Illustrated by Kalos Chan, image owned by Ben Sedley

Have you ever felt worried? And someone said, “Don’t worry about it”? Did that help?

Have you ever felt sad? And someone said, “Cheer up”? Did you cheer up?

If your answers were yes, yes, no—and yes, yes, no—then congratulations. You’re struggling with what we call in the psychology biz, being a human being.

Like every human I’ve ever met, you sometimes feel emotions that hurt. You probably also wrestle with cruel or critical thoughts. That’s not a flaw, it’s part of the deal.

And yet you’ve likely been made to feel like you’re doing something wrong when you feel sad or worried, or when your mind turns against you. Maybe you’ve been told to ‘try harder’. Maybe you’ve seen social media posts celebrating people who "succeeded” because they only thought positive thoughts and felt confident all the time.

We live in a world that shames us for having the full range of human emotions.

At the same time, we live in a world with plenty to be sad and worried about: war, inequality, injustice, rising costs, financial instability, threats to our well-being, our loved ones, our communities, our planet…

So here’s the bind: a world full of genuinely heavy stuff, and a culture that tells us we’re failing if we feel its weight. We live in a world that pathologises normal human emotions, where sadness is called Depression and worry becomes Anxiety.

Welcome to Holding the Heavy Stuff: Life Is Hard and You’ve Got This. Here, we’ll explore how we’re set up to feel like failures just for being human. We’ll look at what happens when we pour our energy into trying to eliminate thoughts and feelings that are meant to be there, and what changes when we stop fighting them. We’ll practise making space for whatever shows up inside us, and learn how to spend our limited time and energy moving toward the people, values, and ideas that matter most.

You’ll even learn to include you in that list of people who matter to you.

These aren’t my ideas. They come from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, developed by people far brainier than me. But the people I work with, and those who read my books, often tell me they appreciate the way I translate these ideas into real life. If you want to learn how to hold the heavy stuff, from a fellow human also living with painful emotions and a noisy mind, that’s what I’ll try to offer here.