My friend Mollie is going through a tough time. Both professionally and personally, there have been some stressors piling up in her life, and as she listed off some of the bigger ones, I found that I could completely relate to her experience. The past few months have been, well, a lot. In addition to the day-to-day fuckery, our washer crapped out and leaked water all over the floor of the laundry room, then the following week our water heater died and leaked all over the laundry room AND kitchen floor, and my windshield got cracked by a flying rock on the highway. But wait! It gets better. Just as temperatures began to dip for the winter, the blower on my car’s heater decided to rally with the bitch ass equipment in the house and wheezed its last breath, followed days later by the frickin’ alarm clock. Out out out goes thousands of dollars, right in time for Christmas shopping. Perfect. wtf.
Then things got really heavy. During the same time as the appliance revolt of Winter 2025, my aunt Luci passed away very unexpectedly, my husband suffered from a painful infection in his tooth (literally on the same day as the funeral) that was subsequently scheduled to be pulled two days before Christmas, and my best friend, who is also the co-owner of our therapy practice, was in the hospital for almost two weeks with a near fatal intestinal infection, was released, and then ended up back in the hospital less than a week later with pneumonia. During this time, I tried to stay calm and optimistic, but the truth was that I was really scared, sad, overwhelmed, and getting progressively more pissed off by the emotional bitch slaps that kept coming, one after the other after the other.
I’m definitely not one to embrace toxic positivity. Spare me the bromides, please. I believe that people should feel their feelings. Hell, it’s in the name, and what kind of therapist would I be to neglect my own? Of course, I am SO grateful that my husband and I have the means to replace all of the crap that was breaking, but those events were just the fart flavored icing on the nervous breakdown cake. My loved ones were suffering, my clients were suffering, the world was suffering, and my big feelings were building like the steam in my Abuela’s old steel pressure cooker.
Yes, I know breathing helps. No, I did not want to breathe!
This is the part where I would normally tell a client to slow down, breathe, and practice any one of the numerous cognitive behavioral strategies we had worked on in sessions. I’ll admit, I did none of those things. I was losing a tug-of-war with the cynical view, seeing recent events as bad luck, feeling targeted by the universe, increasingly panicked by the expenses piling up, so for a while, wallowing felt righteous. Nevertheless, I knew that wouldn’t serve me if I didn’t want to get choked out by the blistering barbed wire knot of anxiety and depression in my gut. I was hurting, so something needed to be done, and I thought it only fair that I took the advice I always gave to everybody else. I had to dig deeper into my clinical tool bag and go for the more top-shelf existential stuff though. Some meaning-making shit was required here.
Ever since I heard the illustrious Tony Robbins ask, “Why is this happening FOR me, not TO me?” I have tried to frame my proverbial slings and arrows from that perspective. Along with the advice from Mr. Robbins, I have two additional strategies for avoiding a Category 5 emotional meltdown:
1. Look for one beautiful thing.
2. Find the lesson or the blessin’.
And that was the advice I gave Mollie. I also suggested that she imagine smacking her problematic co-worker on the head with a shovel. Maybe dark fantasies aren’t as mature or spiritually evolved as the love and light solution, but they can certainly feel oh so satisfying, and although violence is never the answer, sometimes the nervous system needs to feel fierce before it can feel regulated. We’re not shooting for elegance here – just peace.
Look for One Beautiful Thing (when everything feels like trash)
As fate would have it, a friend of mine from college recently sent me a text with a photograph he had taken. In it there were three columns of red light reflecting off wet pavement. The color was concentrated in the center, feathering out toward the edges the way watercolors spread when the paper is too wet. I wondered what was casting the pillars of light, what was going on around the scene, and what exactly was it that caused my friend to snap that picture. What did he see? How did it make him feel? How did it make me feel?
When I’m intentionally looking for one beautiful thing, my mind is engaged elsewhere rather than the source of my anxiety or depressed mood. It’s kind of like standing on one foot when you’re mad. You’re only able to focus on not falling over, and not what triggered your anger.
The beautiful thing doesn’t even need to be related to the source of distress, like when I’m driving and some shithead pulls out in front of me while there was NO ONE ELSE BEHIND ME, DUDE then proceeds to drive 15 miles below the speed limit, I can just look for some wildflowers on the side of the road, or the way the ice glistens on tree branches like melted diamonds. The best part is, when focused on the one beautiful thing, my brain is flooded with dopamine, and my nervous system goes from “Where’s my head smacking shovel?” to softly yet deviously chuckling as I imagine that driver getting a flat tire. He definitely isn’t getting a speeding ticket. Slow-ass jerk.
Find the Lesson or the Blessin’ (while trying not to spiritually gaslight myself)
Finding the blessin’ part isn’t always easy, especially when the bleeding won’t stop. Yes, I have an amazing husband, the most incredible friends, a (mostly) loving family, cozy home, job I love, savings in the bank, health, food, hot water (now), and all of the other obvious wells from which gratitude springs, but sometimes it’s really hard to list all of the things I’m grateful for when it feels like I’m being punished for my transgressions from eighteen lifetimes ago. Fuck you, Karma.
Still, I would not be bested, so here’s where I landed. The blessing of a dead water heater meant having to get a new water heater, which, on top of not having to take an ice-cold shower, meant that my brother-in-law, an expert HVAC technician, stopped by to check my husband’s handiwork, so I got to spend the afternoon hanging out with my sister while the guys did their thing. (Okay, that helped a little. Let’s keep going). Anna was finally out of the hospital, and my playmate was back at work. (Oh crap, this is actually working). 2026 was only two months away, so I could close the door on all the crap that happened in 2025 (Bye, bitch). Ah! I could feel the barbed wire uncoiling.
The harder part for me is learning the lesson. Everyone who knows me can confirm that I’m highly oppositional, and sometimes I just don’t want to be introspective. There are times when I’d rather whine and cuss and throw things that shatter – when I must wrestle my inner child to the ground to prevent any real carnage. But I’m a grownup, so I don’t actually throw breakable things.
Also, just to reiterate, I don’t run around smacking people on their heads with shovels either. Now the cussing and whining, that’s a different story. Those just come with the territory. Anyway, as I was saying, there had to be a lesson or two to glean from the mental and emotional turmoil of the past two months. After all, I was making it through, and that was enough for the time being. Besides, I only had to find the lesson OR the blessin’, not both. I’ll leave the epiphanies for when I’m feeling a bit peppier.
I Couldn’t Do It, But Mollie Did
Recently Mollie texted me that she and her troublesome co-worker had sat down for a heart-to-heart and opened up about some of their shared struggles. Both were battling hellish perimenopausal symptoms (Girl, FELT!), both were grappling with uncomfortable changes at work, and both admitted that they were taking it out on each other. Mollie said, “Sometimes you just don’t know what other people are going through or maybe how your own actions are perceived even unintentionally.” Damn, Mollie. What do the kids say nowadays? She understood the assignment.
Mollie certainly found the lesson there. It’s a pretty universal one too, right? What would this world look like if we simply took some time to really consider the other person’s point of view? I always tell my clients, and I try (and yes, I fail) to live by this rule: in any meaningful relationship, you don’t need to agree, but you have to understand. Vulnerability can be such a relief when someone truly values your pain. It connects and heals us because let’s be real, we’re all getting our butts kicked out here and it’s nice to know we’re not alone. Besides, compassion costs absolutely nothing, and sometimes that’s the only currency I’ve got.
What Helped (Eventually)
So back to my original ordeal…the last two months of 2025 were an outright dumpster fire. Sometimes regulating is easy. Even the simplest pleasure can chill me out, like putting a warm pair of socks on my cold feet, or a fabulously raucous belly laugh during an overwhelming day.
My friend Anna is notoriously good at cracking a joke at the perfect moment to defuse my meltdowns. However, Anna had just gotten out of the hospital after almost DYING, so I certainly wasn’t going to trouble her with my problems, and comfy hosiery just wasn’t going to cut it this time.
I just had to get through it and hope I didn’t get my ass blown off by one more goddamn emotional landmine before Christmas vacation. Maybe that’s the whole point. Not to feel better, or wiser, or wholly transformed, but accepting what is, and noticing something beautiful while everything else feels like trash.
Some days that’s all I’ve got. I didn’t emerge from this enlightened. Like I’ve said before, I’m not the Buddha. I’m still oppositional and tired and hostile toward platitudes. What I found instead was that I survived it all without losing myself. I stayed human and found some beauty along the way – a photograph casting red light on wet pavement, a hard conversation transforming umbrage into empathy, a moment when the barbed wire loosens just enough to breathe.
Some days, that’s enough. No lesson. No fixing. Just staying present when Life drags you around by the butt crack – and still finding one beautiful thing anyway.
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