Exhale

A letter about paranoia (for all of us who wait for the other shoe to drop)

Dearest reader,

This week I find myself thinking about safety.

You might notice that I’ve taken a break from writing to you. The truth is that I’ve been overcome by an intense desire to rest in recent months. 

My brain is sluggish. It struggles to focus. I sit down with the intention to type something for you – to lasso my brain and pull it to the page – but I lose the tug of war. The rope tightens. My brain leans deep backwards into the comfort of dumb animal videos on TikTok and episodes of Downton Abbey I’ve seen one million other times before.

Maybe it was the darkness of the winter. The colder weather (though gratefully not nearly as cold as when we used to live out east).

But, likely, it is this: 

The last several years have been a slog. 

Recently, some lingering loose ends were tied up and finally I am looking around, surveying the laundry list of worries that have been tattooed on my heart, and seeing that most of them have been crossed off the list. 

Now, I’m not saying that life isn’t still stressful. I’m working full-time and parenting a teenager. Life is a circus.

But some key, large, looming, additional stressors on top of the regular, day-to-day shitshow have finally fallen away. And I feel – even a little – like I can breathe again. Like I finally can rest, because things have settled into place a bit. 

This is good news, right?

…Right?

Then why does it feel so ominous?

Even typing these words about “worries crossed off the list” feels like tempting fate. “Famous last words!” my brain shouts from the confines of its lasso. “I told you not to write about this shit!”

Following several tough years, my brain has been set to “waiting for the other shoe to drop”. And now that the coast is clear, I’m finding it really difficult to flip the switch.

It’s been really killing my buzz, TBH.

So… what’s really happening here?

I’ve been noodling on this a lot, so I’d like to share with you where I’ve landed.

Let’s get started.

Foreboding Joy

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Brene Brown’s concept of foreboding joy. 

“If you ask me: What is the most terrifying, difficult emotion we experience as humans? I would say joy.”

- Brene Brown 

Sounds counterintuitive, right? 

We assume that joy is the goal. And that when we achieve it, we’ll feel blissfully happy and complete. But for many of us, joy arrives and we find ourselves instead feeling nothing but dread.

Sure, we might experience a moment of heartswell and satisfaction, but for most of us that moment is followed in quick succession by the worry that the joy won’t last.

• We fall in love, and instantly picture being blindsided by the person cheating.

• We get a promotion at work, and are reminded that we now have that much further to fall.

• We kiss our kids goodnight and start worrying about their safety walking to school the next day.

It’s so frustrating! Infuriating even. Like, can’t we just have a moment to bask in the warmth of the joy before it’s overtaken by dread?

To further complicate this situation, many of us have experienced in the past the strange dichotomy that life tends to serve up, in which our happiest moment IS GENUINELY FOLLOWED BY receiving the worst news of our life.

For me, as many of you know, this was finding out that I was pregnant with Juniper, and then very shortly after finding out that my dad, my best friend, my person, had terminal pancreatic cancer and would not live long enough to meet his first grandchild. He died six days before I gave birth.

When we’ve experienced something like this, in which our most profound tragedy is nestled so closely to our most profound joy, it’s hard to disentangle the two. 

The feeling of joy is naturally vulnerable – like a deep cut in the skin. The subsequent tragedy gnarls around it like scar tissue. 

We harden to joy, mistakenly believing that we’re protecting ourselves from the next slice.

Moving forward, like Pavlov’s dogs, every time we feel the sweetness of joy, we can’t help but associate it with the distinct suspicion that something terrible must be lurking right around the corner.

Is it Safe to Feel Good? …and is it Right?

Admittedly, writing an entire letter to you about how everything is going great right now feels like the most dangerous thing I’ve done in a long time.

Murphy’s Law is twisting its moustache behind me, an evil grin spreading across its Cheshire Cat face.

“A grin without a cat” - Lewis Carroll

Further, another obvious question is regarding the ethics of feeling good when so many other people in the world are living their worst nightmare. 

Is it okay for me to feel safe when safety is an impossibility for others right now?

Ironically, Brene Brown herself is being taken to task as we speak, having penned a wishy-washy both sides essay on the genocide taking place in Gaza (which she instead diminished to a mere “human rights violation”). 

The rhetoric of embracing vulnerability doesn’t stretch as far when the people in question have no choice as to whether or not they embrace it. When your food, water, health, home, and dignity have been stripped, where do our warm and fuzzy vulnerability teachings land? 

As it turns out, good things have limits, and we need to be aware enough to see the line. 

When we surrender to joy, we are inherently focusing on our own experience, separate from the concurrent pain of others. This is a fact.

And, when we surrender to joy we are inherently taking a risk.

The fact is that I might press “send” on these words to you, in which I declare my own current experience of safety and happiness, and immediately receive a terrible, world-altering phone call. 

I might once again meet one of those “before and after” moments that change my life forever.

In “Marrow”, Elizabeth Lesser describes these moments so perfectly when she says:

“My cell phone rings. I think of turning it off. I’m on vacation. It’s a special day. My children are here, my closest friends. Who would I need to talk to? I check to see. A Vermont number. My sister. And so it starts.

‘I’m sick.’ That’s all she says. A landscape bigger than Montana opens up between us. We both fall in.”

- Elizabeth Lesser

Having fallen into this landscape before, it’s my greatest fear that I will meet its depths again. 

I fear that in surrendering to joy, I might set my sights so optimistically at the bright skies ahead that I will trip into a crevasse and find myself once again blindsided by the deepest hurt of my life.

It’s scary. 

It’s scary most of all because it could actually happen. 

We are always only a phone call away from tragedy. This is true.

AND, the fact is that life marches on in the moments between those life-defining phone calls. 

Further, if our ears are explicitly attuned to waiting for the next ring, we will miss the only beautiful things that life ever gives us.

Feeling Safe in Safety

The task at hand for me, and perhaps for you as well if you are standing at a similar juncture, is to learn how to feel safe in safety. 

I’ve been trying a few different things. But I’d like to share with you the practice I’ve arrived at:

I set the intention to notice good feelings when they arise. 

[This sounds small, but having spent years perfecting the ability to roll around in the emotions that make me feel shitty, this step has taken a lot of work. It’s the foundation, so it can’t be skipped.]

Noticing the good feeling tends to go something like this metaphor: I’m standing next to a window and the good feeling taps on the glass. I open the window to allow it in, and shortly after, the breeze blows in a scary thought. 

• Knowing that the scary thought is coming (like wind) prepares me in advance. 

• Knowing that it is just wind (a force of nature outside my control) allows me to bring my focus back to the good feeling.

From there, I repeat to myself a somewhat counterintuitive mantra. It goes something like this:

I am feeling good in this moment, 

AND, inevitably, at some point, pain and heartbreak will once again knock at my door. 

This good feeling will not last forever. 

But this fleeting moment of safety is true right now. 

And so I am safe to surrender to it.

Listen, I understand, this is not a “conventional” good thought. It’s kind of sad and scary.

But the fact is that if something I love – a person, a circumstance, or a good feeling – is meant to exist only for a short period of time and then leave my life, there is nothing I can do to stop it. 

I have no control over how or when something good leaves, or when something bad will arrive. 

I can’t extend the good feeling’s lifespan by clinging to how long it will last. All I can do is deepen my enjoyment of it while it’s here. 

Though you would think that remembering the transient nature of my good feeling would make it harder for me to feel good, it actually makes it much easier.

This isn’t groundbreaking philosophy, friends. Memento Mori (the practice of remembering that you will die as a way to live better) is thought to have originated from an ancient Roman tradition. In Bhutan (one of the happiest nations in the world), it’s part of the national curriculum to think about death at least 3 times a day.

The irony is this: 

Our fear of feeling good is rooted in the fear of good things being taken away. 

But the fact is that good things do depart and bad things take their place. 

We can only begin to feel safe in safety when we learn to let our emotions – both pleasant and unpleasant – arise and fall.

We can only begin to feel good when we drop our resistance to the fact that at some point, we will feel bad again.

So, How Has it Been?

Having practiced this for several months, I can tell you that this is most definitely a practice, and something that I have to work on daily.

But I can tell you that day by day, it’s allowing me to experience more joy – especially during the small, boring, mundane moments (that make up 98.7% of life anyway).

For example, last week I was washing dishes. Beyond my sink is a window, and on the sill I keep my silly little collection of vintage ceramic salt and pepper shakers. I have collected them over the years from Facebook marketplace, Value Village, and various antique shops. They are so stupid looking. And I love them.

I stopped scrubbing and looked at them. My little collection of things in my little home. A home where I feel safe. A home where I feel settled. 

I experienced a warm, melting sensation in my chest. 

It expanded the more I noticed it. 

Listen: I’m not perfect at this practice. There are many times where I notice a feeling of safety and am still instantly overcome by worry and dread. I hop on board and allow the devastation train to take me to whatever terror it has planned that day. Toot toot.

But I am learning, very slowly, moment by moment, how to disentangle dread from joy.

I am learning how to feel safe when I feel happy. 

I am learning that even though sometimes the other shoe will drop, I can still allow myself to wear the full pair while I have them.

Right?

Have you ever struggled to feel safe in safety, or to separate joy from dread? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below.

Sending you so, so much love.

Kyra

Did you like this post? It would mean so much to me if you could email it to a friend, or share on your social media channels!

To read more of my writing, follow me on Instagram or TikTok, or purchase my book. To work with me directly, book a 1:1 session or in-person/online workshop for your corporate group.
Kyraevans.com