It’s tempting to run away from your negative feelings. To ignore your sadness, deny your grief and numb your pain.

Tempting. But ill advised.

It’s impossible to be truly happy if you never let yourself feel truly sad. To fully experience love, you have to be willing to fully experience loss. You can’t be sensitive to pleasure without being sensitive to pain.

That’s a really hard lesson to learn. Especially because taking the opposite approach can be so useful.

Instead of resigning myself to feeling love and loss, pleasure and pain, gratitude and grief, in equal measure, I often try to have my cake and eat it too. Rather than taking the good with the bad, I’m almost always more interested in figuring out how I can maximize the good and minimize the bad.

And in general, I think it’s a worthwhile approach to take. If you’re mindful of the greatest sources of suffering in life, you can mitigate against them. When you accept that, at least to some extent, life is suffering, it’s easy to end up suffering far more than necessary. Better to curb it where you can.

But that doesn’t mean you can avoid it altogether. Trade-offs are in fact inevitable.

I’m a sensitive person. I cry easily. I care about how my words and actions affect the people around me. I pay close attention to the thoughts and feelings of others.

For a long time, I tried to be less sensitive, because being sensitive sucks sometimes. I was tired of my feelings getting hurt, tired of feeling like I was giving away too much power to the people around me, tired of being accommodating when I should’ve been assertive.

But luckily, along the way, I had a boss who encouraged me to reconsider. She helped me see that my sensitivity was my superpower and that trying to eliminate all of the downsides was counterproductive. She helped me understand that if I wanted all the best parts of being sensitive, I’d have to be willing to accept some of the worst.

If you want to be trusting, you have to accept that occasionally you’ll be deceived. If you want to be empathetic, you have to accept that occasionally you’ll feel overwhelmed by sadness. If you want to put your heart into things, you have to accept that occasionally it will be broken. That’s the cost of doing business. The price you pay.

Surviving the pandemic has been really hard, for so many people, for so many reasons. Lost jobs. Lost moments of connection. Lost loved ones. We’ve lost our sense of normalcy, our sense of control, our sense of certainty. We’re angry, anxious and afraid. Lonely and sad.

It can be tempting to run away from that tsunami of negative feelings. It can be tempting to refuse to feel those emotions, to be unwilling to feel them fully.

Tempting. But ill advised.

Because you can’t limit your range of negative emotions without limiting your range of positive ones. The more you numb the pain, the more numb you’ll be to pleasure. The more you refuse to go deep, the more shallow you’ll become. The depth of your floor limits the height of your ceiling.

Instead of putting on a brave face, instead of trying to escape, instead of letting yourself go numb, give yourself permission to feel sad, to admit that you’re lonely, to accept that there’s good reason to be anxious and afraid. Instead of ignoring those emotions, name them. Instead of running away, sit with them. Seek to understand them. Dare to experience them more fully.

This has been a tough time for the kind, the caring, the empathetic and the aware.

Don’t let it close your eyes, your heart and your mind. Don’t let it rob you of your humanity. Don’t let it change the best parts of who you are.

You may feel the pain more acutely in the short term. You may suffer more than the unaware, the insensitive and the unsympathetic.

But that’s the price you pay to appreciate the good stuff more fully. To experience the greatest depths of love, happiness and joy, you must be willing to experience the greatest depths of despair.

It’s a small price to pay. Even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.

Steele