A Pity Party Is Still a Party: A Feel-Good Guide to Feeling Bad

Introduction

I WROTE THIS BOOK DURING COVID. NOT THAT I HAVE ANYTHING TO COMPARE IT TO, but writing a book about pain during a global pandemic felt both more and less difficult than it might have been otherwise. I thought I had a lot to say about grief in the Before Times, but boy have I gotten cozier with despair. We all have. We haven’t had a choice. The last few years brought some dark aspects of human psychology to light: in addition to massive waves of loss, widespread social unrest, and a general sense of terror everywhere, we’ve also been learning the hard way that we need connection to be well, or stable, even. During quarantine, rates of depression nearly tripled in the United States. At first it seemed like technology could keep us connected, but at some point the group chats silenced and we found ourselves staring at our respective walls, waiting for something to change. Many of us felt like our mental health was dangling by a thread. Everyone in the Zoom meeting had that flat, familiar look in their eyes. Small talk went from uncomfortable to unbearable. Yet as the virus spread and mutated, some people were unwilling to admit that anything was even happening.

Throughout the pandemic, it seemed like everyone’s old boss took to Facebook to warn that precautions were a way of living in fear. Distant relatives posted vague calls for unity, hoping others would make sacrifices they weren’t willing to make themselves. That guy you went on two dates with claimed the virus didn’t even exist until it arrived in his own neighborhood, family, and finally his own body. Calls for hope started to feel less like attempts to comfort and more like outright refusals to acknowledge any pain that wasn’t one’s own. One term that emerged during this time is toxic positivity (TP), which refers to an ideology promoting an optimistic outlook at all costs. While positivity on its own is great, toxic positivity takes it too far by implying that attitude is the only thing that matters, and that by changing our mindset we can alter or even evade the most painful aspects of existence. This is especially offensive when expressed in the face of tragedy and injustice, as it essentially blames people for their suffering. At its core, toxic positivity is a form of avoidance. One might imagine that a multitiered, worldwide emergency would be enough to get even the most avoidant person to admit that times are tough, but unlike the other form of TP, toxic positivity was not in short supply.

For months, the public discourse kept shifting from strategies for resolving the crisis to debates about whether there actually was one. No proof seemed to be enough. Unless you were a researcher studying self-fulfilling prophecies, it was a great time to uninstall social media. In our isolation, however, most of us developed even more of an addiction to it. As I paced my apartment doom-scrolling and weeping, I became convinced that our collective tendency to look on the bright side isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous, and it’s partly to blame for the mess we’re in now.

Perhaps one genuinely positive outcome of the pandemic was the way it gave people permission to feel bad publicly without explaining why. Bosses became more lax about deadlines, friends stopped asking why we were wearing the same outfit for days, strangers saw us stifling tears and nodded in camaraderie. No one needed to justify why they felt and looked awful because everyone assumed this was the hardest thing any of us had been through. And while this shift was vital, it was also overdue. Every problem COVID created already existed for someone. Many of us had been hurting that much or worse our whole lives, but when our pain couldn’t be explained by a pandemic, we were expected to keep it to ourselves.

Not only did recent years bring an increase in permission to feel, they brought an increase in discussions about mental health. As rates of mental illness soared, people started sharing what they were learning in therapy, even encouraging others to get a therapist. As much as I’ve loved to see it, I think it’s important to remember that therapists aren’t miracle workers. I’m a therapist, and I’m also just a person. Like you, I have insecurities and blind spots. Like you, I stress-baked a cake yesterday and ate the whole thing with my hands. Throughout the pandemic, I struggled alongside my clients and colleagues to remain stable in the wake of near-constant crises. And while I believe in the power of therapy, I don’t think it’s enough to solve the current mental health epidemic. There’s a very real limit to what we therapists can do to help our clients when the culture itself is antagonistic to many of their basic needs.

At the end of the day, therapists are in the same mess as everyone else. Therapy has an important role to play in shifting the cultural tide, but what we really need is to fundamentally alter the way we coexist. We need to create a society where people help each other before things get dire. To do this, we’ll have to lean further into the embarrassing art of exposing ourselves. Not in a gross way, don’t be weird. We need to share our woes when they’re major and when they’re minor. Yes, get a therapist, but also get better at being honest with the people in your life about how you’re doing. Don’t just talk about your feelings once they’ve passed, show them in real time. Cry at work. Thank others when they do the same. Go out of your way to show up for the people in your life. Get out of bed at 2:00 a.m. and drive to your friend’s house if that’s what would help. Let them snot on your sweater, then play their favorite song and take them to get French fries. In order to build a future where mental health is even possible, we’ll have to remember how to count on each other. This will mean being witnessed at our worst. Things might get weirder before they get normal-er, and we’re going to have to see each other through those hard times.

You won’t get quick or easy answers here. I don’t think you’re going to get them elsewhere either, and, ultimately, they’re not what we need. We need to ask hard questions. We need to do the slow work of remembering how to feel, but we don’t have to do it alone and it doesn’t have to be miserable. Bonding at rock bottom can be empowering, relieving, and, dare I say, fun. In doing so, we are reminded that being a person, even in the darkest of days, is a pretty good gig. As I write this, I’m still alive. If you’re reading it, so are you. I think that’s cause for celebration. And while I’m sad that we can’t celebrate together today, I know there will be a time when we can. We will be together again. We’ll dance together. We’ll laugh and cry together, and if I have my way, we’ll do them all at once.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

This book is for those who have been told to cheer up, who can’t pretend to feel fine when they’re not, who cry while reading the news, and who don’t know where their grief ends and the world’s begins. It’s for people who are lonely. It’s for those who are afraid to ask for help, who are recovering from a life of suffering in silence. It’s for people who don’t belong to a culture they feel safe in, who didn’t get a handbook for life’s struggles from family or religion, or who did get a handbook but it sucked. It’s for those who come from lost or broken lineages, who are raising children with more compassion than they were raised with and trying to show their elders a better way. It’s for people who check in on those who are suffering even when they themselves are heartbroken and grief-stricken, people who identify as highly sensitive, who don’t want to give up on humanity. It’s for the witches and the rogue healers. It’s for the therapists, social workers, and the night-shift nurses bringing my father fresh water, and anyone trying to hold the hurting together. This book is for people who are tired.

What you take from the ideas outlined here will be specific to your identity and history, just as what I’ve written was informed by mine.

WHO THIS BOOK IS BY

I’m Chelsea. I’m a psychotherapist, writer, and founding director of Big Feels Lab: a nonprofit promoting collective mental health. My pronouns are she/her. I’m a deep thinker and deep feeler. Friends describe me as intense, fun, and, frankly, not very chill. I’m one of those people who not only dislikes small talk but finds it confusing and anxiety-producing. Before becoming a therapist, I was an enthusiastic therapy client. I’d show up each week, genuinely pumped to process whatever I was grappling with. I’d been going for years before I realized that other people don’t think therapy is fun. Like, someone is just going to listen to me? And help me sort through my most unfiltered thoughts and feelings?? How is that not a good time?!? To each their own, I guess.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by emotions. I love psychology, philosophy, and sociology because I’m driven to understand how life feels to those whose experience differs from mine. I wasn’t necessarily a bookish kid (more into making potions and interviewing neighbors about the mystery of the missing stray cat), but I did find myself scribbling stories, poems, essays, and lyrics onto scraps of paper wherever I went. I’ve always used art to turn the world sideways and see it anew. I’ve written a lot of books already (The Beginner’s Guide to Potions, Missing Cat Chronicles) but this is the first one to be published, so I’m pretty stoked you’re here.

For the personality-type people, I’m an Enneagram 8 wing 7, ENFJ-A, Explorer. Taurus sun, Libra rising, Virgo moon. I was born in Texas and raised in Nebraska. I’m an only child and was adopted by my grandmother, whom you’ll hear more about soon. I’m a feminist (because I believe men are as capable of kindness as everyone else), poet (though I think most poetry is bad), musician and music freak (constantly singing in places where that’s discouraged), and lifelong dancer (though for me, dance is less about choreography and more about release). I’m obsessed with wild animals and insects and the many forms a body can take.

I draw from paganism (read: witchcraft) and Buddhism in my spiritual practice and am also influenced by existentialism and the burgeoning field of somatics. I was raised in a community of punk rock weirdos, so the part of me that still wants to impress hipsters by being ambiguous and ironic is at odds with the super-sincere part of me that wants to write love poems to flowers. If you pay attention, you can see that tension play out on these pages. Above all, I believe in connection. I believe in magic and the dignity of what we can’t understand. I believe most of us are doing our best and that it’s good that we’re alive. Even now, right in the mess of it, even still.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

I was once at a party in a California mansion with a bunch of half-naked life coaches. While wandering through the house trying to avoid another three-minute hug, I found a book on a coffee table and started thumbing through it. Soon, two unnecessarily hot women rushed over to inform me I was reading the book the wrong way. Apparently, the author was present and had expressly stated in the book’s intro that it was not to be read in a distracting environment. I opened to the beginning and, sure enough, there was a section forbidding readers from consuming the text in an unfocused manner. Intrigued, I had these helpful guests lead me to the esteemed author, who turned out to be (you guessed it) an old guy with a ponytail. I tried to engage him about the vision of his work, but he mostly sat smiling while another man I was pretty sure was Sting treated us to an impromptu didgeridoo performance. It was not Sting.

I am not the ponytail guy. I want you to read this book in whatever way is most convenient. Thumb through it at a party, pretend to read it on the train so the person next to you stops (or starts) talking. My hope is that you’ll use what you find here to move further into your life, rather than retreating from it. Although if you need to retreat for a while, I’m happy to join you there as well.

Everything in this book is an invitation. Some of what’s written is meant to push you outside your comfort zone, but the challenge should be rewarding and exciting, not torturous or terrifying. Only you will know where that line is, and it may change from day to day. That’s okay. You get to decide. Just because I work in mental health doesn’t mean I know what’s best for you. We are the experts on ourselves, and we have the right to pick and choose what healing practices work for us. So while I hope you’ll find what’s written herein helpful, I trust that you’ll know if something isn’t a fit. If that’s the case, I invite you to disregard that section.

Logistically, the book is organized into essays, activities, and science-y lists. I know how tired our brains are, so I tried to break ideas into bite-size chunks. In terms of activities, some are designed to be practiced alone, and some require a group. The activities are marked with an asterisk in the Table of Contents, so if you want to skip straight to those, you can find them more easily. There are also journal prompts throughout. You can obviously write on your phone, but there are mental health benefits to the old-fashioned method of writing stuff on paper, so you may want to think about getting a journal if you don’t already have one.

CAN YOU PITY PARTY TOO HARD?

I know what some of you are thinking, Can’t you take the whole pity partying thing too far? Yes, yes, you can. Of course! Anything can be taken too far. But you can also not pity party hard enough, and that’s what most of us are currently doing, so.

Pity partying is an art. Skill is required to do it well. There are a few key warning signs that will tell you when you’re taking it too far, each of which we’ll cover in greater depth farther into the book. For now, just keep an eye out for these things.

Putting Things Off. Pity partying is not about doing nothing about our problems. It’s about getting in touch with what we’re feeling so we can make better choices. If you notice that you’re putting off important decisions for more than a few days, that might be a sign that your party is headed the wrong direction.

Apathy. Pity partying is about learning to work with our sadness. The goal is not to become cynical, apathetic, or hopeless. Gloria Steinem once described the difference between sadness and depression this way: In depression, nothing matters. In sadness, everything matters. If we start to notice that events which would normally spark emotion for us now leave us feeling nothing, this could be cause for concern.

Isolation. This is the one to really watch for. We all want to be alone sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with that in doses. But if we start isolating in ways that are atypical for us, or stop sharing important information with the people we’re closest to, we should reach out to a therapist.

In addition to isolating behavior, look out for isolating thoughts. These sound like: No one understands me, and nobody else has this problem. No matter what you’re feeling, someone else has felt it, too. We want our pain to link us up with others, not position us farther apart.

Some signs that you’re pity partying well include:

experiencing a deeper sense of connection

feeling more empathy for yourself and others

having greater clarity around your thoughts and feelings

seeing the world as more heartbreaking and beautiful

practicing new rituals for moving through emotions

generally getting cooler and weirder

MEET THE PHONE FAIRY

I won’t lie, I’m totally addicted to my phone. I am decidedly pro-tech, and I believe the internet has the power to radically alter our world for good. THAT SAID, I can’t deny the negative effects of tech on our mental health. Smartphones and most of the apps on them are designed to be addictive, and have basically hacked our poor little brains. They promote distraction and, in the day of scary news cycles, anxiety.

Our dependence on technology also has an impact on our social skills. Older generations are now accusing younger ones of having forgotten how to have a conversation, and while I think that argument might be a little simplistic, there’s some truth to it. Our phones allow for certain forms of communication, but there’s no replacement for in-person bonding. I don’t think the problem is that we’ve forgotten how to talk (humans have never been great at that), but more so that we’ve forgotten how to be present. This tendency toward dissociation isn’t great for personal or collective health.

When we’re trying to connect deeply with others or ourselves, we need to bring our full attention to what we’re doing. We need to focus on our senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. Phones make this difficult. There is always another meme, article, or person to swipe on. For this reason, I’ve invited the Phone Fairy to help us to put these magical devices down. Whenever it’s especially important that we be present, the Phone Fairy will be there with a gentle reminder. Think of her like the mama phone who’s coming to have her own party with her babies. The Phone Fairy recommends buying a basket (thrift stores have tons of them), decorating it, and leaving it by the door when you host events or practice these activities yourself. Maybe you can even invest in a couple extra chargers for different phone types so everyone can leave with a fully charged device!

Despair, But Make It Fashion

RETHINKING MENTAL HEALTH

The Cry Baby Creed

HERE’S WHAT I THINK WE MUST DO:

Let our hearts break. Get softer, not harder. (Most important.)

Let