What Our Bad Days Teach Us
I've been struggling more than usual lately, and it's time to talk about it.
Hey there, beautiful people!
The past two weeks have felt like their own full year to me. Anyone else? Full humanity on display here, it’s been an incredibly difficult stretch. This week in particular was one of the hardest I’ve had in a while.
Real quick before we get into the meat of the article: I’m going to be hosting a FREE event together with PFLAG National that was designed for PFLAG members (but is open to anyone!) on how to lead with joy to drive meaningful change. It will be an open, engaging session on how we can build movements that last and take care of ourselves and each other while we do it. The session will be on March 24th at 5:30PM PST!
(If you want to support me as a human but don’t want to read a whole article, I’d love it if you would leave a comment/restack/reply with your favorite picture of your pet or a beautiful nature photo you’ve taken. These always make me smile.)
For a minute there, I chalked my struggles up to something chemical. I told some of the folks in my support system that I was in “pre-depression”: some of the symptoms were starting to show up in a very real way, but it wasn’t too late to intervene. I knew I was at a turning point for either getting better or getting worse, and I knew that I couldn’t sustain how I was feeling, but I still assumed it was simply that sometimes brains get depressed (which they do!).
Yesterday, I talked to a whole collection of trans folks I love deeply and all of them voiced similar feelings: the past two weeks have felt particularly heavy, frightening, disheartening, etc. Even if they didn’t name the news, even if they tried to have good boundaries, transphobia was still a heavy shadow looming over all of us.
When my wife and I went for our evening walk, I had a moment of clarity I’d been sorely lacking. I had perhaps been assuming that being empowered to take action, setting boundaries with my news intake, taking time to focus on good news, etc. were CURES to fear and hopelessness. Foolishly, I thought that I had been sorted into the category of “people who are not emotionally impacted by the news”. Sometimes, I think my work here contributes to that. I’ve built a brand (that I’m incredibly proud of, and that I still stand by fully, don’t worry) based on being someone who fights for joy and for hope. For many people, I am the canary in the coal mine.
Generally, it’s really meaningful to me to be that source of light. I love it. But it also creates some difficulty with asking for help. Some people hear that I have a bad day and dismiss it outright: “you’re the good news guy! Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll feel better soon!” Others immediately take my struggle as a sign of the end times: “if Ben is struggling, things must be really bad. There’s no hope for the rest of us.”
Some of these are things folks have actually said to me. Others, I think, are expectations that I put on myself.
SO I have decided to spend today’s newsletter talking about bad days. I want to open up conversations around mental health, wash away guilt any of us might feel on the days we struggle, and tie things back to hope and joy as I always do.
First, to get some strong words on the page that I need to hear, and maybe you do, too:
Being hopeful and joyful does NOT mean never having a bad day, a bad week, or a bad month.
Choosing to be joyful does NOT mean pretending not to struggle.
NO ONE benefits from you pretending to be joyful all the time.
Struggling with mental health is NOT a sign that it is time to give up.
What does it tell us when we struggle?
I’ve been holding a quote from the incredible advocate Valerie Kaur very close in my heart lately:
“The opposite of love is not rage. The opposite of love is indifference. Love engages all our emotions: Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects that which is loved. We cannot access the depth of loving ourselves or others without our rage.” - Valerie Kaur, book: “See No Stranger”
All of a sudden, the perspective shifts. The heaviness I am carrying in my heart is not a chemical failing; it is the beautiful, horrible, divine, connective magic of what it means to be a human who can still care. In the face of a regime trying to keep us so overwhelmed that we run out of energy to care about one another—and trying to build policy that insists we throw countless others onto the sacrificial altar of “growth”—holding deep love for the world around me is an incredible act of resistance.
This pain won’t, and can’t, come up with every issue. I think if I tried to hold the grief of every person in the world, I would collapse (as many of us have likely experienced), but total indifference won’t help either. What matters is finding a middle ground where we can genuinely, deeply, profoundly feel the hurt that is around us, then we can heal from it and get back to work building something better.
This is what it means to me to be oriented towards joy. I am not pretending that I don’t struggle, I am staring into my pain to ask “what does this teach me about being human? Where do we go from here?”
The difference between pain and hopelessness
Lately, Kansas has been incredibly heavy on my heart. The fear that many trans people I love are experiencing is ratcheted up to terrible, unsustainable levels. To be clear, do I think things in Kansas are hopeless? Do I think things are on an irreversible slide towards disaster? No! I know we will keep fighting, we will find ways to survive. But I ALSO know this will be incredibly frightening, isolating, and painful while we fight that battle. Both things can be true at once: I can grieve with Kansas, I can know we will keep fighting back.
I’ve been feeling lots of big emotions as I stare down this latest fight: anger, exhaustion, fear, frustration, judgment, but never hopelessness. The reality is that I have no idea what is going to happen. It would be pure hubris to pretend otherwise. But I think Rebecca Solnit puts it better than I ever could:
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we do not know what will happen and in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” - Rebecca Solnit, book: Hope in the Dark
Hope and action feed on each other. I am hopeful because I take action. I take action because I am hopeful. I do not know how things will work out, but the only way to guarantee an ending is to give up and walk away. That said, the deeper we get into despair or depression (which are different from each other!) the harder it can be to motivate ourselves to take action. Not just action for change, either. Actions like going for a walk, taking a shower, calling a friend. So how do we pull ourselves out?
Using Joy to Heal
There’s a song I love for when I’m going through a difficult time. If you’re struggling right now, I’d recommend giving it a listen. (IT IS NOT CHILD APPROPRIATE, DESPITE THE CUTESY TITLE)
My favorite line from the song:
But here’s the thing: No one ever got happier sitting around waiting to get happier…
Every day we wake up and we get out of bed
And we get dressed
And we clean up last night’s mess
And we keep doing these things, not because they’re guaranteed to make us feel good
But because failing to do them?
Guaranteed to make us feel bad!
Being oriented towards joy also means treating myself with the same profound love I am trying to bring towards every other human being. I’ve been giving myself a lot of tenderness and asking “what do I need?” a lot. Honestly, most times I’ve asked lately I haven’t known the answer. So I’ve been trying stuff, because the depression tells me that I don’t want to do anything, that I just need to lie down and rest, and I know for me that seductive voice is trying to make things so much worse.
Here are some things I’ve been trying to do a little extra lately:
Texting a friend to ask them to send me funny pictures they’ve taken lately
Calling a friend to ask them to force me to go to the gym while we’re on the phone
Committing to eating three meals a day, no matter what they are I cannot avoid eating
Closing my eyes to listen to music that moves me, or albums I associate with better days
Asking an artistic friend to help me do more low-stakes visual art
NOT CANCELLING PLANS!!! Unless I can justify what need will be met by cancelling, which I never can.
Trying to find a new therapist in California
Telling my friends that I am struggling so they are aware
Setting up plans to co-work, body double for cleaning, or otherwise just be around other people
Trying out some new tarot threads to help me figure out what was hurting so badly
Constantly blasting the album “Secret to Life” by FIZZ and dancing, singing, spinning along to it
I can’t say any of these individually have “fixed” where I am. I’m in the steep uphill part of “getting better”, to be honest. But I’m walking towards it. I am making sure people that I love know that I am walking, so I don’t have to do it alone.
If you love a trans person, make sure they know it a little extra this week.
A few other resources for folks who are struggling, or folks who want to know how to better help their loved ones:
For all the folks reading this who are struggling in their own way, know that I am right here with you. I see you, I love you, and it won’t feel like this forever. We will keep walking together. Ever forward.
All my love,
Ben
Thank you for being so open. I completely agree about what you said regarding the heaviness in your heart. It’s in those moments of being human - all of the feelings - where if you can observe it, it can be beautiful in its human way.
Your tenderness and grief is as much a gift to the world as your joy. Thank you so much for staying in the fight (for trans rights, and the fight to be alive, whole, and in touch with your humanity), and just as much as you have many eyes looking up to you, I hope you feel that you have many hands to support you and lift you up. ❤️🩹🫂