love notes from monique #4

There’s this vicious cycle of hard work that tells you it’s wrong to revel in your good feelings about your accomplishments. It tells you that this type of behavior is equal to complacency.

So this stunts your ability to feel good and revel in your own happiness about your own experience. In turn, it can make you feel like a ‘stooge’ for feeling good; over time, it can make you feel ridiculous for feeling good about what you did at all.

We’re told we’re wallowing, or that being “complacent” makes us soft… weak. So we learn to stifle our happiness and our good feelings. We don’t want to be soft.

Hard is better.

So we turn away from feeling good and turn into the hardness. Being harder must be better. Isn’t harder stronger? And if that’s true, isn’t harder more durable? Better to be durable than weak.

But is hard more durable? The fact is that hard becomes brittle over time. And brittle breaks. So which is more durable? Hard or malleable?

Malleable means flexible. Flexible is not rigid. But being flexible also means a willingness to be vulnerable — to not look strong all the time, to not be impervious.

Where can this inquiry take you? What can you heal that you’ve held in all this time?