Blaming yourself, hating yourself, feeling deep shame. All of these atrocities have one feature in common: Feeling stuck. There’s a psychological heaviness to being trapped inside of your own mind, to recognizing how miserable you feel and knowing you are powerless to change your state. It’s a funk. A slump. A swamp. Whatever you call it, it sucks.
Stagnation is one of the most dangerous places because we feel like there’s no way out. We can't see the possibility of a solution. A lot of times, we don’t care enough to swim through the craptastic abyss so we let our own heaviness consume us.
A couple weeks ago, I walked out of my advanced composition class pissed as hell. I had a long list of first world problems, and none of them looked like they were going to magically disappear anytime soon. My roommate also had a particularly shitty day so we vocalized our shared hatred at the world. We had to walk to a meeting that night, too for something we were both royally ticked about. Why did we have to go back on campus? Why couldn’t we wallow in the comforts of our own home where there were Trader Joe’s dark chocolate bars and unlimited hours of Netflix?
On our way to the meeting, my roommate—a majestic unicorn with the sharp intelligence of Minerva McGonagall yet the childlike spirit of a rule-breaking moth—decided we needed to roll down the hill in between the Computer Science Building and Taylor Hall. So we did.
I got really grassy and dirty and dizzy, and I knocked my elbow all over the ground, bruising it up like a hastily dropped apple at Shop ‘N Kart. I felt sick and dizzy and puketastic. And did I mention that any amount of motion, even swings, makes me want to hurl?
I won the hill race, not knowing it was a race. Obviously we had to do it again so my roommate could prove she was actually better than me and that me winning was just a fluke.
My advice to you the next time you feel like I did—since I’m so obviously an expert on, well, life—actually comes from "Big Hero Six."
When Hiro can’t solve his engineering problem, he gets mopey and apathetic. I can’t relate to the engineering part, but I totally get the pissed off about getting stuck part. That’s usually when I rip up my subpar drawing of a horse that looks more like an oddly shaped continent with legs, or when I delete an entire draft of a manuscript I spent hours working on. Cue the mantra. This sucks; I’m stuck; I give up.
What happens next is genius. Hiro’s older brother, Tadashi, looks Hiro in the face, scoops him up, flips him upside down, and shakes him around, saying, “Look for a new angle.”
The next time you feel stuck in the mud of personal failure, do something stupidly small to shake your world up a bit. Roll down a hill. Call someone you haven’t talked to in years and tell them every single one of your problems, demanding them to listen to you and reflect your problems back in their own words. Run as fast as you can down a steep hill, screaming at the top of your lungs as you wonder whether or not you’ll break your leg in the process (also my roommate’s idea—are you noticing a trend?) Wake up hours earlier than normal to see the sunrise. Admit to someone via a public forum, such as the internet (cough cough), that you have no idea what you’re doing and like to humiliate yourself to give your life meaning.
We need to be our own best friends and not let ourselves take our own shit. We need to shift our perspectives when we get stuck. And we need to keep trying and not give up, especially when we really want to.
