There Is Nothing Wrong With You
It’s not you…it’s the culture, and your rage is normal.
We live in a culture with no tolerance for more complex and intense human emotions, especially women’s rage.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Chronic stress, anxiety, depression, and rage are the norm for so many of us these days, especially women. When we feel these and other less-than-pleasant emotions, we typically start to ask ourselves, “What is wrong with me that I feel this way?!” We blame ourselves for not feeling well when the world around us is burning.
Who among us wants to feel anxious, depressed, stressed, overwhelmed, and unable to sleep at night? None of us, but on a certain level, we have known for a long time that there was something deeply wrong, but we were conditioned all our lives to believe that all is well and that the status quo is all that matters in our world.
Our situation is exacerbated when those in power take absolutely no accountability for their part in the whole mess of things. As the ultimate caregivers that we as women are, we naturally blame ourselves and attempt to shame ourselves into submission and perfectionistic standards to set things right. When the culture shames us for “not getting it right” or for “not being enough,” all we know is to do the same to ourselves. We ask, “Yeah, what IS wrong with me?!!” and then we set about to fix the “mess” of us.
The Problem: Toxic Positivity, Perfectionism, and Trying to Get it “Right.”
We have all been conditioned to believe that there is something deeply wrong with us and that we are flawed on a fundamental level. This is quite simply untrue. The idea that we are somehow broken is perhaps one of the biggest misperceptions that exists in this life, and it is one of the primary causes of chronic stress and emotional despair.
This skewed perspective is constantly perpetuated by messages from our broken culture. Part of the internalization of our pain is because our culture preaches happiness above all else. We are conditioned to believe that we should be happy all the time, and that if we are not, it means there's something wrong with us. In a culture that shames and pathologizes emotional and mental health struggles or just flat out denies their existence, what else is one to do? We are responding in a normal way to a quite abnormal situation in which we are given limited options. It’s a double bind - if we don’t go along, we pay, and if we do, we also pay.
The real issue is that we’re not taught that sadness, anger, anxiety, and even despair are normal human emotions, and apt responses to the challenges of life. Instead, our deeper emotions are pathologized and viewed as deep-seated issues that have to be rooted out or medicated away so that we remain sedate and calm.
The Truth and the Deeper Issue…
Now more than ever, it is vital to understand that there is nothing wrong with you, and there never was. The truth is that you are worthy just because you are alive. It’s that simple. There is nothing you need to do or become, nothing you need to fix or root out to be worthy. There is no purpose you need to fulfill to be enough. You are worthy and perfect because you are alive.
Our culture encourages and even fuels the misunderstanding of our true nature, so it makes sense that many of us feel this way.
We live in a sick culture that has no regard for the well-being of humans, animals, or the Earth.
What is valued above all else is materialism, profit, greed, and power over others. This limited, fear-based mentality has now been made abundantly clear in our leadership, and we see it all too often in our neighbors, acquaintances, and in our own families. The devaluation, manipulation, control, coercion, and gaslighting that are a part of mass control and domination are happening on the macro and the micro levels of our experience.
Here’s the deal. If we all had a deep sense of our inherent value, we wouldn’t be easy to control, would we? We wouldn’t be such good consumers. The powers that be profit from our belief in our own unworthiness. Billions of dollars of profit are made each year off of humanity’s belief that we are not enough.
We are taught that everything we need to feel good is outside of ourselves…that once we have the house, the car, the white picket fence, and all the other material bells and whistles, then maybe, just maybe, we will finally arrive and feel like we are enough.
It’s the biggest lie, and it never ends - we get one thing, and we want something else immediately. We have become insatiable hungry ghosts because we are trying to fill an internal emotional void with things outside of us in an impermanent world that quickly takes them away once we acquire them. Trying to fill the inner void with external things will never work, and it leaves us feeling even emptier than before, wondering where we went wrong. This confusion and feeding frenzy of consumption fuels the capitalist machine, which is at the very core of our conundrum.
The Good News and the Bad News - You are Normal, Our Culture Is Not…
There is nothing at all wrong with you. Your depression, anxiety, rage, sadness, and despair are all perfectly normal responses to the abnormal situation we find ourselves in, plain and simple.
The world we live in takes no accountability for its part in things. It’s narcissistic abuse playing out on the big stage, and just like a one-on-one relationship with a narcissist or otherwise abusive person, the victim is always at fault, always the scapegoat. They can never and will never take responsibility or admit to any wrongdoing, or hear anyone out who holds any opposing views. It’s all left on our shoulders to bear the burden of responsibility to try to fix a situation that we didn’t even create. It’s maddening and exhausting.
You Are Not Powerless. Here’s What You Can Do…
You are not powerless. What you can do is be kind to yourself, stop faulting yourself for your humanness, and normalize your own complex and understandably strong emotional responses to the injustices and challenges in this world. Through the practice of allowing and leaning into your human experience, you expand your compassion for yourself, and with it, your ability to offer compassion to others expands. This kind of internal shift is the antithesis of what we are currently experiencing in the world.
Use this pivotal time of massive change to consider where you may have been out of alignment with self-compassion and self-care, and what habits you have that may not be sustainable in the long run. Now, more than ever, there is a call to find ways of living that cultivate harmony, contentment, peace, and well-being. This can be done by connecting with safe others, cultivating a sense of internal safety, a connection with your deeper self, a connection with nature, and living as honestly as possible.
Slow, intentional living that doesn’t burn out your body and nervous system is in order. It may not feel like much, but the changes that we make within ourselves in our own corners of the world make incremental changes to the whole. Qualities like empathy, care, kindness, and compassion are in short supply, and when we work to cultivate them, we are doing our part to begin to bring change to the world we live in.
