TBT: The Feel Bad post

This is the post from my old blog that has almost twice as many pageviews as any other post I've written. I edited it quite a bit to shorten it. Originally published January 2012. It's a bit of a rant so avoid if you're not in the mood to be ranted at.


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I'm getting really tired of the constant murmur in certain areas of the internet that we should be able to feel good all the time-- that we should always pamper and indulge ourselves and never do anything hard.

An example: I was reading through the comments of a forum I frequent recently. One woman said she needed desperately to get to work on a project whose deadline was approaching. Instead of encouraging her--you can do it! get your butt in gear!-- there were dozens of comments of a gentler variety: Can't you get an extension? Are you making sure you have time for yourself? Maybe you can schedule a spa day and you'll feel more like working afterwards!

It's a type of response I've seen more and more often lately. In some circles, it seems to be more important to never deny yourself anything than it is to be healthy. You should always treat yourself with indulgence and lenience rather than trying to push yourself to do something difficult.  And while I see their point-- it would be just as bad to go too far the other direction-- it's also a bunch of baloney.

Sometimes you have to do things that are hard.  Or things that are boring, or that you just plain old don't want to do.

If I'm going to bring my cholesterol down without going on drugs, sometimes I have to not eat what I want to eat.  At the end of last semester, if I was going to get that last paper done, I had to force myself to sit down and just do it, even though it felt like forcing myself to drink poison.  If we're going to move into the (smaller) house that we all want to move into, we have to spend hours and hours going through 27 years of crap and getting rid of stuff, which is boring beyond belief.

That's not to say you need to have any of those priorities, but I do, and I'm not going to achieve them by always pampering and indulging myself.  Sometimes you have to work damn hard to get where you want to go.

And the odd thing, the unexpected thing, is that when you do that, somehow magic still happens. It wasn't until the last 90 minutes of editing that final paper that I figured out what I was trying to say and was able to whip it into shape. I didn't feel inspired or motivated or creatively engaged until after I'd already slogged my way through hours and hours of forcing myself to write.

And then sometimes after you work really hard, you need to give yourself a break.  It's a balance.  How many times has this come up recently?  It's hard to find that delicate balance between pushing yourself and letting yourself be.  But I'm convinced it's worth finding.