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The Comfort of Being Okay

My New Discovery

By Josie ElizabethPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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I have come to realize that there is truly something to be said for being merely okay. As someone who has always tried to appear to be happy, this was a discovery for me. The concept of the daily lies we tell each other revealed itself to me over the summer. I started thinking about how, in today's world, it is effortless to come off as happy. We have social media, obviously, where we can easily put on a smile for the snapshot photo we post, although our followers will never really know what is behind that plastered smile.

Face to face interactions are no better. It all starts with a simple question...

"How are you?"

We all hear it every day, and most of us instinctively answer with...

"Good."

I don't know about you, but I am not always good, and yet that is usually my answer. Why? This is the very question I have been considering lately. Why do we lie? Why not say how we actually are? Then it hit me. We don't want to be honest with others about our feelings out of the fear of making them, and ourselves, uncomfortable. If I answered your "How are you" with, "Well, honestly, I'm not the best. I feel rather off and don't know what to do about it."

Well, hmmm. How do you respond now? This can no longer be the simple exchange you may have been hoping for. This can no longer be the elementary level courtesy we all know and love! Your uncertainty of what to say next becomes the overwhelming feeling of discomfort we all know and hate. But why does being honest about how we feel come as such a shock? We have become so accustomed to the reply of "Good," or "Fine," that to break the normalcy of that response seems foreign.

As I said before, I started to consider the concept of being okay and the daily lies we tell each other over the summer. This was when I lost my Nana, a truly incredible woman. After she passed, let me tell you, I was not good, I was not okay. I was, to put it very plainly, bad. In the months to come, all I could think about was my yearning desire to feel okay again. While going through the motions of my day to day life, being just fine seemed severely underrated by those around me

As time went on, I truly wanted to answer people by saying I was good, but I found a sense of peace in becoming just okay. I realized that you don't need to be in those high places of happiness all the time. Being simply okay can be a beautiful thing.

With social media, magazines, TV, movies, and so many other influences around us continuously selling the idea of happiness, it is difficult not to want to describe ourselves as good or even great. Happiness is supposed to be what we all strive for in life, but during those low times when you are straining for just okay, striving for stability, I want to tell you that it is okay! Find your own peace with your emotions. Be honest to yourself and find the courage to be honest with others. Hopefully, you can find the same comfort I have in this release of hiding.

I am not writing all this to say that happiness isn't an amazing thing to feel. I just wanted to express my newly discovered comfort of being okay in the hopes of comforting others. Sharing my experiences is all I can truly do.

Peace, love, and happiness.

happiness
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About the Creator

Josie Elizabeth

I have too many thoughts to keep them trapped in my head.

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