One of my friends had the (mis)fortune of having her dad as a ski instructor when she were in primary school. He purportedly pushed her over every time she whined about how scared she was to go down the run in front of her. “There’s nothing wrong with falling,” he would say, as if cueing his gentle but firm shove.
Many falls and a decade later, she became a certified ski instructor.
I don’t have the tough love in me to push my future kids over on the slopes, but I think (although expressed in a peculiar, silly, and extreme way), there was a nugget of truth in what her dad was saying. When we believe that we should feel and appear okay all the time, it makes us catastrophize when things might not be okay. Before her dad taught her that falling was okay, my friend would go through every possible worst-case scenario in her head and scare herself out of even trying to ski down a steeper pitch. Pain = suffering x resistance—so although we can’t eliminate the pain by accepting that it’s okay to not be okay, we decrease it significantly. It’s okay to fall. When we can accept and feel more at peace with that, our level of anxiety drops.
During the last couple of days of my hospitalization, I befriended a woman who arrived on the unit with horrible insomnia. She said she had never felt so exhausted in her life, and she looked the part. At best, even with medication, she could only sleep in intervals of 10 or 20 minutes. One morning, she looked a little rejuvenated. When I asked her if she slept well, she beamed and said, “I realized that it’s okay to not be okay sometimes. Accepting that means that I’m not catastrophizing every time I can’t immediately sleep.”
So sometimes, when a close friend asks me how I’m doing, I don’t just default to “good.” I am a little more truthful, a little more transparent about not feeling okay sometimes.
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