What is wrong with me and what is wrong with me?
I used to look in the mirror and ask that question almost every
single day. Why am I so broken?
Why am I this way? Why can't I just be more?
Why can't I be enough? What is wrong with me?
This question it it haunted me for years.
I carried it. It was the silent wait.
I whispered it to myself at night.
It raced through my thoughts. But there's a problem with this
question. It assumes that you are supposed
to be something different, something different than exactly
who you are. And that simply isn't true.
My name is Ethan Jewell and welcome back to Feel Your
Feelings. I've had a lot of big feelings
over the years. Very, very big feelings.
I have driven myself almost crazy dealing with these
feelings and I realized that not a lot of people talk about it.
So that's the whole point of this podcast.
I don't want to be a doctor telling you exactly what science
says about your mental health. I want to be somebody you can
trust, a friend just talking to you about my own experience with
mental health. So thank you so much for being
here and thank you for feeling your feelings with me.
Feeling anxious doesn't mean that something's wrong with you.
Feeling sad doesn't mean that something's wrong with you.
Feeling unmotivated, overwhelmed, lost, it doesn't
mean that something's wrong with you.
It just means you're feeling the weight of being alive.
And that's something that every single person that has ever
existed and every single person that will ever exist will deal
with. There's nothing wrong with you.
You're just human. And that's a truth that took me
5 long, long years to figure out.
I, I used to stay up every single night trying to figure
out what was wrong with me because I was so convinced that
something was broken. I, I, I was like, I'm so sad all
the time. I'm so depressed, I'm so
anxious. Why do I feel this way?
And then when when I couldn't attach a tangible reason to that
feeling, I simply became convinced that I was broken,
that something was wrong. We live in a world that
constantly tells us we need to be more, more productive, more
confident, more healed, more successful, more happy, more
right. And when you're surrounded by
messages that scream be better, it's so easy to translate that
into I must be worse. But feeling like you could be
more doesn't mean that you're not enough.
Now. I mean really think about that.
Growth doesn't come from self hatred, thinking I could be more
therefore there's something wrong with me and I'm not
enough. I could be healed but instead
I'm sad so I must be broken and something is wrong with me.
That is not where real growth happens.
Real growth happens from love, not from hate.
Real growth is when you stop and you feel those feelings out of
love, when you feel that anxiety, when you feel that
sadness, when you feel that depression and you allow it to
exist. You allow it to be a part of you
and you learn from it and you love yourself Despite that.
That is where growth truly comes from.
Growth will never come from self hatred.
Healing doesn't require you to label yourself as broken.
Wanting to improve doesn't mean that you're starting from a
place of being defective. The feeling that something is
wrong with you is just a mismatch between your
expectations and your reality. You're expecting yourself to
always know how to be, to always be stable, to always be happy,
to always be everything for everyone.
And when you don't meet those expectations, you feel like
you're falling flat. You feel like something is wrong
and you aren't enough. But the human experience is
literally the opposite of that. You're not meant to have it
figured out. You're not meant to feel good
every single day. You're not meant to move through
life without uncertainty or doubt or or pain or feelings.
So if you're asking yourself what's wrong with me, here's
another perspective. Nothing is wrong with you.
A feeling is happening inside of you, and those are two very
distinctly different things. Maybe you're tired because
you're caring too much. Maybe you're anxious because you
care deeply about something. Maybe you're sad because you're
grieving something, someone, a version of yourself.
Maybe you're unmotivated because your body is begging you,
Forrest. Maybe you're overwhelmed because
you've been pretending to be strong for too long.
That doesn't mean something's wrong with you.
What you feel is not a flaw. It's a function and an
incredibly important part of being a human being.
That perfection we strive for to quote, fix whatever is wrong
with us. It isn't realistic and it isn't
true. Your struggles are not signs of
something wrong. They are signs that you're
alive, you're in motion, you're adapting, you're learning,
you're human. So the next time that question
pops into your mind, what is wrong with me, try answering it
differently instead of saying something is wrong with me and I
need to fix myself. I need to stop being sad, I need
to stop being anxious, I need to be more motivated, I need to be
better. Try saying something is
happening within me and I'm I'm allowed to feel it.
This is a moment, not a definition of who I am.
I don't need to fix myself. I need to understand myself.
I need to understand these feelings.
I need to sit with them. I need to learn.
I need to feel. Because what if there was never
anything wrong with you? What if those feelings aren't an
indication that something is wrong, but simply that you need
to feel something? Your feelings hold so much power
within you that they can cause you to assume that something is
wrong, to assume that there's something deeper going on.
But sometimes you just need to feel.
So I encourage you, when you feel some kind of difficult,
turbulent feeling, instead of immediately jumping to the
conclusion that something is wrong, try to just sit with that
feeling for 15 minutes in a quiet room.
Try to sit with it, see where it comes from, see where you feel
it and understand it. And then accept that you don't
have to do anything about it right away, that that feeling
can just exist within you. Yes, it's uncomfortable, but
it's better than thinking something is wrong.
There is nothing wrong with you. You are allowed to feel your
feelings. Thank you so much for being
here. If you need help feeling those
feelings, you should check out my music on all platforms under
the name of Ethan Jewell. I almost guarantee it'll make
you cry. Also, drop a comment on this
episode. Let me know what you think about
this topic and the idea that maybe we just need to feel our
feelings a little bit deeper. So thank you so much for being
here. Thank you for understanding that
nothing is wrong with you and as always, thank you for feeling
your feelings. I'll see you next time.