I sometimes feel there’s a quiet pressure these days that says if you’re not constantly upbeat, happy, or smashing it online, you’re somehow failing at life. I’ve felt it often, especially when I spend too much time on social media.
Or if success doesn’t happen every day, something’s gone wrong. I want to gently push back on that, because it’s not true, and believing it’s true tends to make ordinary hard days, where we don’t feel productive, feel like personal failures on top of everything else.
Think of standing outside right after a downpour. The air smells different, doesn’t it? Everything looks sharper, cleaner. If you’re lucky, there’s a rainbow. None of that happens without the rain that came first. If there’s no rain, there’s no flowers.
Life runs the same way. The cloudy days, the emotional thunderstorms, and the stretches where everything feels waterlogged are not interruptions to your growth. They’re quite often where most of it actually happens.
You don’t need to be happy around the clock to be living a meaningful life. Happiness is only one colour in a much larger palette. And it’s totally normal for some days to need an umbrella… or occasionally a boat.
Accepting Things
There’s a related skill worth building, too – a kind of gentle acceptance of whatever’s actually happening, rather than constantly resisting it.
I’m not talking about blanket agreement with everything, and not passivity. Just a willingness to be OK with the closed road, the unanswered email, the small daily frustrations that aren’t actually catastrophes… even when they feel like one in the moment.
It doesn’t mean giving up on the things you want. It just softens how much energy you spend spent fighting what’s already happened.
And I find it’s worth applying the same acceptance to good days, too, not just the difficult ones. “I’m OK with whatever happens today” works just as well when what’s happening is really great – a promotion, good news, or an unexpectedly lovely afternoon. It doesn’t dampen the celebration; if anything, it helps you flow with it. And it means you’re not bracing for the next thing to go wrong the moment something goes right.
Ups and downs aren’t a design flaw in life. They’re closer to life’s real architecture.
Ocean tides move in and out. Breath moves in and out. Night follows day, then day follows night again. We evolved inside cycles like these, so it makes sense that our emotional lives follow the same rhythm rather than a flat, permanent line.
Shit sometimes lands before success does. That’s not a sign anything’s broken. It’s closer to how the whole system was always built to work.
The trophy
I was thinking about my dad when I first wrote about this idea in my book, ‘The Joy of Actually Giving a F*ck’. He had a brain tumour, and eventually losing him was the hardest thing our family has been through – especially for my mum, who had never been alone before.
About a month before he died, I sat with him one evening so Mum could get out to bingo with her friends. I asked him about his younger days, and he told me about playing football.
He was lucid that night, despite everything the tumour had taken from him elsewhere. Maybe it’s because he was talking about something from his past he felt good about.
His team, ‘Holy Cross Croy’, won the John Thomson Memorial Trophy in 1962. It was the equivalent of the Scottish Cup for their tier. He’d scored in the final, and several times along the way there. He was clearly, quietly proud.
He went upstairs and came back down holding the cup each member of the team got presented with. He gave it to me and said it was mine now. I recognised it instantly, because my older sister and I used to play with it as children, and somewhere along the way, we broke the base off it.
I treasure that cup, broken base and all. That’s family life – the imperfections can be what makes something more precious, not less. It’s been four years now since he passed, and things have settled into a new shape. And the trophy sits on my desk now. No rain, no flowers.
There’s something in that story I keep coming back to. The trophy wasn’t valuable because it was initially pristine. It was valuable because it carried the whole history inside it: the pride of the final, the childhood mischief that broke it, and then the evening he chose to hand it over anyway, brain tumour and all, still proud of that goal more than sixty years on.
A flawless trophy wouldn’t have meant nearly as much. Our best-loved things rarely are the flawless ones.
Accepting yourself, as you actually are
A few years ago I wrote a book called I Heart Me: The Science of Self-Love, and unknown to my publisher or my readers at the time, I was quietly wrestling with my own self-esteem while writing it. It ended up being one of the most healing things I’ve done.
One thing that stuck with me was this: there’s nothing wrong with you for having problems you struggle to get through. It just means you’re human.
We compare ourselves constantly to curated versions of other people’s lives – “If only I earned money as easily as Joe,” “If only my house was as big as Claire’s,” “If only I could eat like Amy does and never put on weight” – without ever seeing what’s actually going on behind those doors. Nobody’s comparison highlight reel includes their worst nights.
I like to think of life as an enormous cosmic theatre where everyone’s acting out their own role. If you spend your time trying to steal someone else’s costume or their accent, you don’t just fumble your own lines, you rob the whole production of the character only you were ever meant to play.
It’s a bit like trying to force a cactus to bloom like a rose. Oscar Wilde put it better than I can: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” There’s no real payoff in chasing someone else’s reflection when you’ve got your own light to work with.
An invitation
So next time a hard stretch arrives, try resisting the urge to treat it as evidence that something’s gone wrong with your life. It might just be the rain that the next set of flowers needs.
And the next time you catch yourself measuring your life against someone else’s highlight reel, come back to your own role in the theatre. No one else can play it, and the production genuinely doesn’t work without you exactly as you are.
And if there’s a broken trophy sitting somewhere in your own life – a flawed, imperfect thing that matters more because of what it’s been through rather than in spite of it – maybe that’s your reminder to notice it. It’s probably telling you something worth hearing.
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This blog is adapted from my book, ‘The Joy of Actually Giving a F*ck‘.