Dancing in the Rain

How often have you heard about or experienced yourself the exhaustion of modern emotional life? You wake up tired, scroll past three videos about healing your inner child, two clips about morning routines, one man sitting in front of a microphone preaching about the technique that will eliminate anxiety which they discovered on the top of the Himalayan mountain, or, wait, was that that salt? And you just sit there, holding a piece of toast, feeling like you are already failing the exam of being a person.

We have somehow fallen into this strange habit of treating our inner lives like a smartphone that refuses to hold a charge. If you feel a bit lonely on a Thursday evening, you assume you need to download a fresh habit. If your chest feels tight, you figure you must have skipped a page in your journal or forgotten to drink that powdered mushroom sludge that tastes like dirt and costs about the same as a second-hand kitchen appliance.

Now, look, a bit of structure is great. I am the first person to admit that going for a stroll down the street can stop your brain from spinning like a broken washing machine. Sometimes a bit of routine is the only thing standing between a person and a complete weekend-long merger with the cushions on the sofa while Golden Girls play into the small hours. We need things to hold onto. We always have.

But if you look closely at many of these neutral-toned videos and wellness podcasts, something much weirder is going on.

A fantasy, a misunderstanding, begins to form.

It is the belief that if we just collect enough psychological vocabulary, if we monitor our heart rates perfectly, if we analyse every single memory from our school days, we will finally become completely bulletproof.

People rarely say this directly of course. Instead it appears in softer forms. “I just want to get to a place where nothing affects me anymore.” “I want to stop caring so much.” “I want to become the best version of myself.”

We start craving a version of peace that looks a lot like a high-security apartment block. Spotless floors. Fingerprint scanners at the door. Absolutely no uninvited guests allowed inside, especially not the heavy stuff like grief, or the sharp sting of being rejected, or that strange, hollow ache that likes to show up at a quarter to twelve at night while you are standing there with a toothbrush in your mouth.

I can understand why people want this. Heck, I want this!

A lot of people became emotionally hypervigilant because life taught them that feelings could drown them. Some grew up around chaos. Some spent years being misunderstood. Some loved people who disappeared emotionally while still physically sitting in the room. Some learned very early that competence received praise while vulnerability made other people uncomfortable.

So they built a fantastic suit of armour.

They became productive. Insightful. Reflective. High functioning in that slightly concerning way where someone has twelve channels running in their brain at all times yet still replies “Doing well thanks” with frightening speed and professionalism.

After a while, improvement itself starts feeling emotionally protective.

If I can just think clearly enough, maybe I will not suffer.

If I can just analyse myself deeply enough, maybe heartbreak will bounce off me like rain on glass.

If I can build a life structured enough, perhaps uncertainty will finally stop breaking into the house uninvited.

Eventually, the act of trying to improve becomes a hiding place. We tell ourselves that if we can just figure out the exact theory behind our behaviour, heartbreak will simply slide right off us.

The tricky part is that self-analysis actually does work a bit. It is a bit of a tease. Learning about yourself can clear up a lot of confusion. Therapy can help you stop repeating the same old disasters. I have seen it happen many times. Human beings are remarkably capable of growth. Sometimes painfully so. Sometimes beautifully so. But human feelings have never really cared about logic. You cannot solve your way out of being human.

You can meditate every morning and still feel abandoned when somebody takes three hours to reply “k”.

You can understand attachment theory and still feel your stomach drop when your partner’s tone changes slightly over the phone.

You can communicate perfectly during an argument and still end up crying in the bathroom afterwards staring at your own reflection like a disappointed football manager after a losing season.

I really cannot blame this modern desire to be untouched by the world. When you strip away all the clinical words and optimisation talk, people are really just looking at you and asking, "How do I get through the day without it hurting so much?"

It is a heavy question, because the person asking it is usually exhausted from trying to hold their own walls up for years.

I sometimes think contemporary culture struggles to tolerate ordinary emotional pain. Everything becomes framed as malfunction. As inefficiency. As a breakdown of the system. As something to eliminate quickly before it interrupts productivity.

Feeling uncertain after a breakup becomes “emotional dysregulation.”

Feeling grief for years becomes “failure to move on.”

Feeling restless about your life becomes “poor mindset management.”

Even boredom now gets treated like a technical fault. Five seconds of silence and half the population reaches for their phone like discovering someone had just unplugged their life support.

When you treat every single shift in your mood as a glitch that needs to be fixed, you miss the point of why the feeling showed up in the first place.

Some anxiety comes from trauma, yes. Some also comes from caring deeply about what you are doing.

And yes, some sadness comes from depression. Some sadness also appears because a person suddenly realises time is passing, their parents are ageing, and nobody warned them that adulthood would feel this emotionally strange even on normal Tuesdays.

And yes, some loneliness comes from distorted thinking. Some loneliness also comes from the simple fact that human beings were never psychologically built to live half their lives through a small glowing rectangles while pretending it is the same thing as sitting on a porch with a friend during a summer holiday.

When you become the supervisor of your own nervous system, constantly standing over yourself with a notepad, taking notes and making adjustments, you stop actually living your life. You are just managing it.

And it makes you incredibly tired.

You spend your days chasing an imaginary character. The person who is completely resolved. The person who never gets rattled. The person who feels like a calm lake every single day.

Meanwhile, the actual world just keeps happening. Friends drift away without any big conversation. You’d think that Dorothy could at least make a few visits every year, especially with her mum still living with Blanche and Rose!

Then your parents grow old. Your own bodies get creaky. People fail to understand what you mean. Love comes. Love leaves. You still miss people who were terrible for you. You still walk into meetings carrying the ten-year-old version of yourself inside your coat.

Accepting that you cannot outsmart this stuff is actually a massive relief. Because eventually you realise the goal was never invulnerability.

The real aim was never to become an island that nothing can touch. Most of us do not actually want to be numb. We just want to feel like we can handle being exposed to the elements without coming apart.

There is a huge shift that happens when you stop using your routines and your books as a shield. You become much softer tools once you allow yourself to be a bit fragile. It is impressive to be able to build a massive, thick walled castle to keep the world out, but a real home offers us a comfortable chair to sit in while the weather happens outside the window without locking us in.

At some point, healing becomes less about constructing an impenetrable psychological fortress and more about developing the capacity to sit inside life as it unfolds, sometimes messy, sometimes tender, and absurd quite often.

We have always been the sort of creatures who cry over things we cannot quite explain. We have always looked for certainties where there are none to be found. We have always tried to lock the front door to keep our hearts safe, while secretly hoping someone will still come along and knock on it anyway.

Isn't it quite comforting to admit that?