What if You’re Not as Fine as You Look?

 

 

Someone I love is suffering. Which means I am suffering.

As I’ve tried to navigate this most unpleasant experience, I’ve become aware of something: more people are suffering right now than I ever realized. Clients. Friends. Family. Neighbors. Strangers in passing. The next time you’re surrounded by people — in a meeting, at the grocery store, scrolling past faces on a screen — take a look around. Chances are someone you see is suffering. Or maybe it’s you.

And suffering has a way of tearing you apart, because despite your best efforts to make everything better, you eventually run into the truth: some things are outside your control.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. Regardless of the cause, suffering brings emotions that are uncomfortable, inconvenient — the kind we’re conditioned to hide. We live in a culture that prides itself on having it all together. Social media rewards the highlight reel. And work asks for a particular kind of performance: leave your problems at the door, put on the happy face, get the job done.

So we suck it up. We push it down. We deny the feeling, deny the reality that we’re suffering at all.

It’s a survival tactic, and it’s socially rewarded. You can put on a semi-happy face, tend to the business at hand, show up, produce. You can muster the energy to keep moving while leaving your heart behind you. You can hold everything and everyone at a polite, boundaried distance.

But it comes at a cost. And the cost is steeper than it looks.

What denial actually costs you

It takes an enormous amount of energy to resist an emotion that’s already welled up inside you. That effort shows up as exhaustion at the end of the day — the kind no amount of sleep touches, because it was never physical to begin with.

What I’m realizing is that our attempts to escape pain wall us off from the very thing that has the power to relieve it. Shutting the door on your heart will, in fact, keep the pain out. But it’ll also keep out joy, connection, inspiration, presence — everything on the other side of that same door.

Something vital departs. The work goes stale. Conversations become droll. Meetings get attended by a version of you that checked out somewhere around the parking lot. You go through the motions, check the boxes, but you yourself are not really there.

And you can’t connect to others when you’re not connected to yourself. People feel the distance — and they tend to meet it with more distance. It becomes a quiet, compounding cycle that alienates the very people you love and lead. Left unchecked, you risk becoming a hollow shell of what you once were: still moving, still producing, but lifeless underneath it.

So is the answer to swing the other way?

Is the fix to run around telling everyone what’s going on — airing every frustration, narrating every hard day, making your suffering everyone’s business?

No. That’s not it either.

The answer is simpler, and considerably less dramatic: it’s to feel what you’re already feeling. Not necessarily at work. Not while you’re on the hook to deliver something. But somewhere in your life, to actually be present with the emotion that’s asking for your attention.

Emotion is, quite literally, energy in motion. It has a charge. It’s trying to get you to notice it — not so you’ll perform it publicly, but so you’ll let it move.

That’s the part most of us skip. We treat emotion like a problem to solve or a weakness to manage, instead of something that simply needs to pass through. And when it doesn’t get to pass through, it doesn’t go away — it just gets buried under the effort of holding it together.

There’s another way through this

What if, instead of walling yourself off from the sadness, the frustration, the tenderness, you let it move through you the way it wants to? Underneath the discomfort, there’s energy — real, unharnessed energy that doesn’t have to just sit there. It can be redirected into creativity, into clarity, into the kind of presence that lets you actually show up for the people around you.

That’s not a small shift. It’s the difference between a leader who’s performing steadiness and one who’s actually offering it.

I’ll be honest — I don’t think feeling your way through something is the whole answer. It’s the doorway. What happens once you actually let an emotion move — what it feels like, what it turns into, and why sitting with it changes its shape entirely — is worth its own conversation. That’s next.