Recently I’ve been swimming a few concepts around in my head and usually the culmination of that time is mostly word vomit, surmounting to not a lot. I listen a lot to conversations when I am out and about, not intentionally but just in passing, or forgetting my headphones and sitting on the tram for 35 minutes. You hear a lot.
Many mothers take the tram in groups of two or three.
I also know a lot of mothers, and while I don’t talk a lot, I do listen when spoken to.
I keep coming back to the same topic, the pressure to ‘feel good’, or as it were, the pressure to look as though you feel good. Like you have everything under control and you are one happy-go-lucky mama.
A couple of weeks ago, two mums were on the tram and they were talking about something, and at a certain point in the conversation, one turned to the other and said:
Yes, but you can’t let the kid see ya like that can ya, it ain’t right them seeing you crying and shit
Another conversation I was involved in recently was a bit different, the take-away for me here was:
Keep smiling, eventually you’ll be fine
The majority of my conversations are with women, so it got me thinking about what I perceive as a pressure to ‘feel good’ or at least appearing to feel good all the time. I’ve seen a few things like ‘feel good, look good’, or ‘all you need is a smile’, and perhaps I am looking to much into the meaning behind these simple sentences. It just feels like it’s a constant reinforcement that we should be feeling good all the time, and that is the key to being happy in life, you’ll feel good and look successful.
In my first few years of parenting all I ever saw was adverts with happy fake (maybe) mothers in soft pink jumpers smiling. Always smiling. Whenever I felt sad, in the mildest sense of the word, I also felt like I was wrong. I was meant to feel good. I can only imagine that for people who suffer with any kind of depression that this is so much more painful, that it has a bigger impact.
So if ‘feeling good’ is the standard, and looking happy to the outside world is expected, does that mean that by default a large chunk of people are falling short? Perhaps this goes hand in hand with why people find it so difficult to admit that maybe they aren’t feeling good. Meaning that Mental Health services have had to go above and beyond to reach out to people to say
Hey, you know what, it’s okay to not be feeling okay
It’s like a push-pull, we are told in one breath that it is okay to not feel great, but are also continually told that ‘feeling good’ is the goal. Maybe, the real point is changing the narrative, changing the way we are advertised to, and what constitutes feeling good to me, might be totally different to Stacey up the road. My version of good might just be getting to the end of the day without having a melt down, and Stacey’s might be getting to the end of the day at all.
Snap out of it, chin up, you’ll be reet, have a cuppa you’ll be fine, sort yourself out, it’s not that bad.
A continual slew of soundbites thrown at people who are brave enough to just say – today, my day is shit. I’m guilty of this myself, but why? Because I am programmed to always be a smiling happy-go-lucky woman, and I make the very stupid assumption that everyone else should be this way too. It’s ingrained in me so deeply.
I know more people who have some degree of depression or anxiety than I do those without. Those without I wonder if they are the lucky few, or indeed it’s just something they don’t talk about.
Just gets me wondering, is the pressure to ‘feel good’ and the continual smiling adverts the reason so many of us feel like we aren’t doing well? Then on from that wondering where we are going wrong, then on from that some more compounding the deep rooted feeling that we aren’t feeling good at all.
Is the pressure to feel good, the reason so many people just don’t?
