Do You Ever Feel Moody For No Clear Reason? If So, This Piece is For You.

Being human is a tough job.

Street Art by Author

*THE ORIGINAL VERSION of this story appeared in Better Humans.

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Several times a month I get into a spell.

A nothing matters, what’s the point, most people aren’t to be trusted, I’m worthless, everything and everyone I love is going to end kind of spell.

Sometimes it lasts two minutes, sometimes a few hours, sometimes a day or two. 

Do you ever experience anything like that?

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I’m entering a beautiful phase in my life. After 44 years of having all kinds of experiences — a massive career change, living in different cities and through many kinds of relationships, the drug addictions and death of loved ones, traveling the world, I’m falling into what feels like the biggest love affair of my life. Three in one actually — with myself, my work, and my man.

And I’m doing it. 

I’m managing it well — that “quandary” I explored last year in my piece, This is What David Bowie Taught Me About Sex, Love and Work. I’m finding it’s possible to commit to two big passions at once: that of my life’s work as a writer and artist and my relationship. I’m finding a way to balance my time and energy between them, each helping the other to evolve.

I feel more fulfilled than ever before. In fact, it’s the moment I’ve been waiting for.

That this kind of existential angst is moving through me despite this long awaited arrival of love in all areas of my life, had me wondering more about this being a human thing.

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Since I am both a conscious person who’s done her fair share of inner work and a master over-analyzer — (looking forward to dropping the latter), I naturally ask myself these kinds of questions first when I’m falling down the rabbit hole:

• Do you need to rest more?

• Are you putting too much pressure on yourself?

• Are you drinking too much wine?

• Are you feeling vulnerable?

• Is an old trauma being triggered?

As of late, however, I’ve been using a different approach when it comes to dealing with my moodiness. Even if I answer yes to some of these questions, I’ve been coming back to one thought only:

Being human is tough job.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in love, taking impressive risks, accomplishing big things, doing what you love or alternately frozen in fear, searching for passion, in an unhappy relationship or dissatisfied with life in general.

There are things we can all do to make our lives better. Maybe that means it is time to leave a job or relationship, find or pursue your passion, drop the perfectionism, do some inner work, take a nap or whatever.

On the other hand, evolution is a constant (if we choose) and there will always be a better version of ourselves to reach. Since I’m getting tired of being an over-do’er and analyzer, I’m starting to lean into a different kind of strategy to deal with my existential anxiety spells. 

Rather than fast track into what I can do to make my life better or an emotional state less intense, I think more along the lines of: 

What can I not do? 

And have started to practice these three things.

I Try to Keep the Questioning and Analyzing to a Minimum.

Of course it’s good to ask questions like the ones above and locate where and how in your life you’re being triggered or what you can do to live a more fulfilling life.

But sometimes it’s really not.

I‘m thinking in particular about all the suffering that comes just from the questioning and analyzing or whatever it is we do to undo uncomfortable feelings.

NEWSFLASH! Life is uncomfortable. 

And so, what if nothing is wrong and nothing is to be done? 

What if it’s just a spell that will pass in time and what’s to be done, the only task in fact, is to let yourself be? 

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Like the Earth has her seasons, we too have ours when it comes to emotional states, especially as we’re making changes. It’s normal to go through periods of struggle and confusion whether it be the identity crisis that comes with being a teenager or the awareness of mortality that comes with mid-life. 

Some of us will go through the dark night of the soul at least once in our lives, a phase where meanings we once had about life collapse and we are left with a deep sense of meaninglessness. 

But sometimes that deep sense of meaninglessness, that existential despair is not so much about a season. Or a nervous condition. Or an unresolved trauma. Or a spiritual breakthrough. Or a fill in the blank…

It’s about experiencing an inherent quality of our humanness, one which often manifests as a wave of despair as we register these humbling realities.

The “Being Human” contract

We are alive, we age and one day we will die. 

That while being alone is a choice, it also is not. Although I don’t love the word spiritual to describe my beliefs, for lack of a better one, I am most definitely that. I believe, for one, in our ultimate oneness. 

But I also believe in our humanness. 

And from that perspective — that of our human “self” who is part of a unique species who can perceive and create his or her own reality, we are indeed alone. 

In other words, we will always feel our separateness not simply because we are conscious of that reality but because we are, in fact, all different. No one will ever be able to fully grasp the fullness of our individual experience. If we get lucky, alone we will reach that level of understanding with ourselves. 

To take it a step further, we are able to create and experience beautiful works of art, genius inventions and the ordinary bliss of experiences like connecting with other people, the smell of coffee beans or a walk through the woods. This same instrument of consciousness which can create and experience mind blowing beauty can also can create mental prisons, emotional suffering, physical pain, and wars.

But here’s the important thing to remember:

This duality is precisely what makes us human: one pole of experience cannot exist without the other and often the transformation of one pole leads to the deepening and complexity of the other. 

For example, the experience of pleasure can’t be registered without knowing the feeling of pain. The deepest of love cannot be held with without having made contact with the reality of one’s hate. The flight of joy without the heaviness of sorrow. Did you know depression is not a state of being sad, rather the outcome of the repression of a whole spectrum of feelings, sadness being one of them?

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. -Carl Jung

I don’t think great art always requires great suffering. However, it is often the transformation of ones pain into something else that lends itself to works that move, fascinate and heal us. I recently read a 1998 Salon interview with Steven King, known as the “king of horror” where he said this:

My mother used to say, when we were scared, “Whatever you’re afraid of, say it three times fast and it will never happen.” And that’s what I’ve done in my fiction. Basically, I’ve said out loud the things that really terrify me and I’ve turned them into fictions, and they’ve made a very nice living for me and it seems to have worked.

Pain and its gang (frustration, anger, sadness, disappointment, discomfort and so on) are givens in life. We can resist that fact and suffer considerably more or lean into it by honoring and transforming our pain through ways that suit our own individual personalities. 

So, what’s wrong with pain? Often nothing. That’s why it’s important to drop the over-analyzing.

In fact, our evolution, similar to that in the natural world and the universe at large, requires a certain amount of chaos to evolve! 

While somewhat relieving to hear, still…oof! That’s a rough reality to contend with never mind hold and it doesn’t help we are living in a world which has collectively agreed that pain is bad and death is to be feared. 

In a world that mostly runs like hell from their feelings, it’s no wonder we are ill equipped to deal with them. Sometimes I feel I’m on one giant emotional roller coaster ride.

And the truth is, I am. 

It’s called life. 

On postmodern emptiness

On top of the challenge of being human, comes that of being a postmodern one, bringing on more challenges than modernity did. 

In a time where we are inundated with information, where anything is possible and everything must be had, where technology while being a tool that can foster connection and the expansion and integration of ideas at a more rapid pace, if misused can create profound disconnection, unrelenting polarization and unhealthy ideas about how one should look, be or act.

The other day as I was walking down a bustling Berlin street, I was struck by the amount of information my brain and body had to process — from the crowds of people and their energy to the store signs, advertisements and street art. 

It made me aware, now more than ever, how important it is to find ways to NOT process all of this information. 

Amongst all these worlds and options being offered to me, it hit me that I have to consciously choose my own reality more actively than ever before. 

For much of my life that has meant not watching or reading much news and not getting sucked into the cultural narrative of any kind of world whether that being the psychology, art, or writing one.

It also means for most of us we need to be more disciplined in connecting with the people we love and with nature to quell the existential angst that the post-modern world creates. 

Viktor Frankl, a famous psychologist and Holocaust survivor wrote about the effects of modernity in the mid-twentieth century which apply more than ever today. 

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair which holds promise of dangers.

Now back to that spell.

We’re all freaked out and fu*ked up some of the time because life isn’t a ferris wheel. And that’s okay. 

Because that’s a human thing. It’s brutal and its beautiful.

Now more than ever, I am challenging myself to be a human. That leads me to the second thing I practice.

I Don’t Take My Thoughts Seriously.

I just proclaimed one way to manage these spells is to put the breaks on the questioning and over-analyzing.

It’s true and an important concept to hold.

But I’m a hard core thinker, so that’s not always easy. What’s easier to do is this: I allow myself to think and ask the questions but I absolutely do not taking anything I come up with seriously. 

My impressive but erroneous interpretations, my poetic but tragically off meanings about events transpiring in my life….

Hahahaha…”That’s a good one, Danielle!” is what I remind myself to do when I find myself spinning yet another elaborate tale.

I’ll say it again: Do not take anything you think seriously when you’re down a rabbit hole.

It also helps to say these kinds of thing

Since sitting with uncomfortable feelings doesn’t come naturally for me as for most humans (most of us never got taught that lesson in life), I say these types of things to help:

• ”Danielle, there’s nothing to solve and no one I need to be in this moment.” (a.k.a., drop everything, don’t try to fix anything and don’t make big plans)

• -If it’s true, which 99% of the time it is: “Danielle, nothing bad is happening right now”.

• I congratulate myself for being a normal human (humor lightens all loads and misery) and I do my best to honor the funky place I’m in. For a little humor and reverse psychology in one, joining in with the ego who likes to keep things safe and doesn’t want to be told what to do: “Danielle, it’s wonderful that you hate yourself today.” or “How fantastic that you feel like shit.”After this psychology trick, I find my self-judgment takes a back seat, and most often it is that, the self-criticism which takes us deeper down the hole.

The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgement. -Juddi Krishnamurti

• Because most of us tend to resist negative feelings, using a mantra helps let them flow. (Don’t forget: what we resist, persists and what persists causes problems.) These simple ones have helped me fall asleep on many sleepless nights: “It’s okay to feel scared.” “It’s okay to feel anxious.” Another version: “I drop my resistance to feeling angry, sad, to not having the answers, to feeling this physical pain, to….)” Or “This too shall pass.”

For full power, say these things or your version of them out loud while looking at yourself in a mirror. Writing them down and/or posting them on a wall also is a good tool.

You Are Not Alone.

So I am going to go back on what I said earlier to remind everyone of this: Even though on an existential-human level you are alone, your experience is not. Sometimes, it really helps to say out loud to another person: “I feel like nothing matters.” 

Chances are this person with whom you are sharing yourself with felt that way this week or last month or even a second ago. 

So, thank you for being a flawed, confused, freaked out, fu%ked up human.

I am too and I am with you. 

Concluding Thoughts

Since our human complexity is what makes life hard and beautiful at (precisely) the same time, I’m finding as of late my job here on Earth above all is to learn how to live with and manage that profound paradox. 

We need each other to do that and we most definitely need ourselves. No matter our size or shape, or the form our lives take, we are all creators and by virtue of that have the capacity to transform whatever roller coaster we find ourselves on in this moment.

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