What If Nothing Has Gone Wrong?

If you looked back over the past year and saw joy, hope, gratitude, excitement, disappointment, fear, sadness, frustration, and uncertainty, would you automatically conclude it was a bad year?

Probably not.

In fact, you might say it was a meaningful year. A full year. A human year.

And yet, something interesting happens when those same emotions show up on a random Tuesday afternoon.

Suddenly, we panic. 😳

We feel sad and think something is wrong.

We feel afraid and think we've made a mistake.

We feel disappointed and assume our dream isn't going to happen.

We feel frustrated and begin questioning ourselves.

It's almost as if we've decided that certain emotions are acceptable and others are not.

And I think that creates far more suffering than the emotions themselves.

The Day I Learned I Was a Peach 🍑

There was a time in my life when I thought everybody should like me.

Or maybe more accurately, I thought everybody needed to like me.

Now, I don't think that's unusual. Most of us want to be liked. We want to feel accepted. We want to belong.

But every once in a while, I would realize someone didn't particularly care for me.

Maybe they misunderstood me.

Maybe they disagreed with me.

Maybe my personality just wasn't their cup of tea.

Whatever the reason, I felt bad.

And because I felt bad, I assumed there was a problem.

A problem with me.

Maybe I needed to change.

Maybe I had done something wrong.

Then one day a coach said something I'll never forget.

"Sharon, you're a peach."

At first, I wasn't sure where she was going with this. 😂

Then she explained.

Some people love peaches.

Some people don't.

Some people prefer cantaloupe.

And none of that means there's anything wrong with peaches.

That simple analogy changed something for me.

Because I realized I had been treating my uncomfortable feelings as evidence.

Evidence that I was doing life wrong.

Evidence that I wasn't enough.

Evidence that something needed to be fixed.

But maybe none of that was true.

Maybe I was just a peach.

The Emotional Report Card

If you boil emotions down to their most basic categories, there are really just five:

😊 Glad

😢 Sad

😡 Mad

😨 Afraid

😔 Bad

Now here's what's fascinating.

Many of us have quietly decided that only one of those emotions deserves an A+.

Glad.

We're happy to feel glad.

We welcome glad.

We celebrate glad.

But the other four?

Not so much.

Sad? Problem.

Afraid? Problem.

Mad? Problem.

Bad? Definitely a problem.

Without realizing it, we've created an emotional report card and then started grading our lives by it.

If I feel glad, life must be going well.

If I feel afraid, something must be wrong.

If I feel sad, something must be wrong.

If I feel disappointed, something must be wrong.

But is that actually true?

Or have we simply confused an emotion with a problem?

Feelings Are Not Verdicts

One of the most important things I've learned over the years is this:

Just because you feel something doesn't mean you've learned something is true.

Read that again.

Fear is a feeling.

It is not a crystal ball.

Disappointment is a feeling.

It is not a prediction about your future.

Sadness is a feeling.

It is not evidence that your life is broken.

And yet we often treat our emotions like official announcements from the universe.

📢 Attention Sharon. Because you are feeling discouraged today, your dreams have been canceled.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

But many of us do some version of that every single day.

We feel something uncomfortable and immediately begin building a story around it.

A story about our future.

A story about our worth.

A story about what's possible.

The feeling becomes evidence.

The evidence becomes a conclusion.

And suddenly we're suffering not because of the emotion, but because of what we've decided the emotion means.

The Five-Room House 🏡

Here's an image that has helped me tremendously.

Imagine your life is a house.

Inside that house are five rooms:

The Glad Room.

The Sad Room.

The Mad Room.

The Afraid Room.

And the Bad Room.

Most of us spend our lives trying to live exclusively in the Glad Room.

And every time we find ourselves in one of the other rooms, we assume we've taken a wrong turn.

But what if nothing has gone wrong?

What if you're simply in a different room?

After all, if the house was built with five rooms, why are we surprised when we find ourselves in one of them?

The goal isn't to eliminate four rooms and permanently move into the fifth.

The goal is to understand that the entire house belongs to you.

The Sad Room belongs.

The Afraid Room belongs.

The Mad Room belongs.

The Bad Room belongs.

And yes, the Glad Room belongs too.

They're all part of the original blueprint.

They're all part of being human.

A Different Way to Think About Your Life

I don't know anyone who has lived a meaningful life without spending time in all five rooms.

Not one.

The women I admire most have experienced fear.

Disappointment.

Sadness.

Frustration.

And joy.

The difference isn't that they somehow learned how to avoid uncomfortable emotions.

The difference is that they stopped making those emotions mean something had gone wrong.

Because if only one emotion is acceptable, most of your life will feel unacceptable.

And most of your life is not unacceptable.

Most of your life is simply human. ❤️