V1l5: My Life Looked Fine — So Why Did I Feel So Bad?
Nothing was wrong.
That was the problem.
My life looked fine.
Good, even.
A house that functioned.
Kids who were okay.
A schedule I mostly kept.
A body that showed up.
A mind that still worked — technically.
There was no disaster.
No obvious reason to be falling apart.
No explanation I could point to and say, that’s it.
And yet —
I felt awful.
Not sad in a dramatic way.
Not depressed in a way that came with permission.
Just… wrong.
Uneasy.
Heavy.
Like I was failing a test no one had explained.
Which immediately triggered the follow-up panic:
If nothing is wrong…
why do I feel like this?
I started auditing my life like a suspicious accountant.
Healthy kids? ✔
Supportive partner? ✔
Roof over my head? ✔
No active crisis? ✔
So why did I feel like crying in the car over absolutely nothing?
Why did simple days feel unbearable?
Why did I feel like I was always one small inconvenience away from unraveling?
Clearly, the only logical conclusion was:
It must be me.
I must be ungrateful.
Dramatic.
Bad at coping.
One of those people who can’t handle a perfectly decent life.
I carried that guilt quietly — because it’s a bad look to be struggling when nothing is technically wrong.
It’s embarrassing.
You feel like you owe the universe a better attitude.
So instead of saying I’m not okay, I said things like:
“I’m just tired.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I shouldn’t feel this way.”
Which, as it turns out, is a great way to make everything worse.
Because guilt doesn’t cancel pain.
It compounds it.
Feeling bad is already heavy.
Feeling bad about feeling bad is how you disappear inside yourself.
What I didn’t understand at the time was this:
Pain doesn’t require a visible disaster.
Suffering doesn’t need permission.
And distress doesn’t care how good your life looks from the outside.
You can be high-functioning and still hurting.
You can be grateful and still exhausted.
You can love your life and still feel deeply unsettled inside it.
None of that makes you broken.
It just makes you human.
But when no one around you is naming this kind of quiet distress —
when everyone else seems to be managing just fine —
it’s easy to assume you’re the problem.
That you missed a memo.
That you’re bad at being okay.
I wasn’t in crisis.
I was in contrast.
My outer life said fine.
My inner life said help.
And because the two didn’t match,
I kept assuming the inner one was wrong.
I kept telling myself:
Other people have it worse.
I should be able to handle this.
Why can’t I just be happy?
As if happiness is something you earn by being low-maintenance enough.
As if feeling bad requires justification.
The truth I didn’t want to admit was simpler — and harder:
I didn’t feel wrong because something was wrong with me.
I felt wrong because something inside me needed attention —
and I kept dismissing it
because my life looked “good enough.”
That realization didn’t fix anything.
It didn’t suddenly make me feel better.
It didn’t come with answers.
But it did remove one thing.
The shame.
And without shame,
the feeling was still there —
uncomfortable.
Unexplained.
Still unresolved.
Just no longer evidence
that I was failing at life.
And that question —
what needs attention here? —
was only just beginning to surface.
I didn’t have answers yet.
I just stopped pretending
the feeling didn’t matter.
