This analogy will make the most sense to you if you have long, thick and/or curly hair that gets tangled. If you have short, thin and/or straight hair that never gets tangled, you might want to read this post instead.

I was sick last week, and so I spent three days in bed. During those three days, I didn’t wash or comb my hair, but instead rubbed my curly head back and forth on my pillow a lot. I got out of bed on the fourth day and was excited to finally feel well enough to shower – until I touched my hair.

The term rat’s nest does not do justice to what had developed on the back of my head. It was more like a dreadlock, a matted ball where thousands of hairs had felted into a single, unbreakable entity.

I knew this was going to hurt.

I washed my hair in the shower, and then scooped a glob of coconut oil out of the glass jar. I flipped my head upside down and massaged the oil into the knot before finally starting to attack it with a pick.

Except I didn’t attack it. You can’t attack a mass of hair like that without tearing chunks out of your scalp and breaking into tears. Well, maybe you can, but I can’t. I have a soft head and a low threshold for pain.

So what I really did was gingerly try to comb my hair. I tried to go right at the heart of the mess, but when the pain got to be too much, I instinctively moved the pick further from the center – out to where the pain was bearable.

I continued like this for some time: slowly working my way through the smaller knots, retreating to the pain-free sections, and then trying to see how much closer I could get to the real problem. Eventually there were no small knots to untangle, and somehow it seemed the big knot was gone as well.

This, I thought to myself, is exactly what it’s like to work through emotional pain.

(Really. These are the kinds of thoughts I have when I’m standing with my head between my knees in my bathroom. This is how my brain works.)

Sometimes we try to be brave, or we try to just get it over with, and we go at the heart of the issue. Maybe we hire a therapist or buy a whole stack of books about our problem, because we think we’ll just deal with it already.

But the really hard stuff usually scares us off at first. We back away, because we have to. We take a step away from the most painful parts. Instead, if we’re able to, we sit with the little pains for as long as we can. And then we say, “OK, that’s far enough for today, let’s talk about something else.”

And we keep going like that for a while: slowly working our way through the smaller pains, retreating to the pain-free topics, and then going back later to see how much closer we can get to the real problem. And then, if we’re lucky, we look back and see that we’ve untangled a whole lot of small knots.

Our pain tolerance seems to have improved.

The big knot seems more like a small knot, now.

If we’re lucky.

Or maybe that’s just me. That’s how I’ve worked through the big pain. That’s why it took me years to talk about things like being raped, or having an abusive stepfather, or my little brother being arrested.

I think this is probably normal. Instinctive, even.

I think going back to try again is how you eventually break up the biggest hurts.

And I think all of us have our limits for how much pain and fear we can handle at once.

But I think, too, that complete healing is possible. Eventually.

“When I die, I hope they say: she had the guts to be happy.”

That’s my twitter bio. I wrote it on a whim one random day, but it is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of my much longer mission statement. And most of all, it spells out one of the things I’ve found to be most true and least discussed about happiness: it takes guts.

Courage. Bravery. Whatever you call it, I believe that the kind of happiness that both stirs and roots your soul requires doing tough stuff. Here’s why:

Happiness calls for vulnerability.

Happiness is all about connection, and connections are deeper when we let someone see and love all of us. But doing that demands vulnerability. It demands showing our weak spots. There’s simply no way around it: you can’t be accepted completely if you don’t reveal yourself completely. And that can be scary as hell.

Happiness asks for acceptance.

Buddhists, zen masters, and playwrights remind us that the way to be happy despite dark days is to learn to accept them. Life is not perfect, and happiness isn’t about pretending otherwise. But acceptance lets us at least keep breathing through it, lets us acknowledge what is instead of constantly fighting against what we wish it was. The hard part of acceptance is having to sit still in the dark, to let the pain come and wash over you if it needs to. Acceptance sounds like a serene and peaceful state, but it is a courageous act in practice.

Happiness comes from knowing yourself.

Knowing yourself is awesome. Getting to know yourself can be much less awesome – especially if you’re afraid of what you might learn. Just like showing all of yourself to someone can be scary, revealing who you are to yourself can be just as frightening. Plus, you have to dig up all the fears and insecurities, all the things your brain actively works to keep hidden. But doing that brave work lets you see and accept all of you. It’s worth it.

Happiness demands change.

There’s no avoiding it. Our brains crave change and life insists on giving it to us. We cannot be happy without it, and yet we are also hardwired to fear it. Facing that change, embracing it and finding the joy in it, that requires a whole heap of guts.

Remember this when happiness feels hard.

Remember this when you’re faced with something that scares you. Remember that the doorway to happiness is shrouded in fear, and that all you need is the guts to walk through it.

And remember that you are brave.

I’m not just saying that. I believe that because you are here. You are looking, reading, thinking about how to be happier tomorrow than you are today, or happier tonight than you were this morning. Not everyone does that. Not everyone has the courage to go looking. But you do. So I mean it when I say this to you:

I know that you have the courage to be happier.

And it’s a good thing, because you’re going to need it.

Conventional wisdom – or at least wisdom from most of the Facebook graphics I see – says that you have to love yourself before anyone else can love you. As a proponent of self love, self esteem, self have-faith-in-yourself and all that other selfish stuff¸ I’m inclined to agree with that motto. But in practice, I have to admit that being loved helped me learn how to love myself.

I had a brief twitter chat about this recently with motivational speaker and author Tiphani Montgomery (further proof that Twitter is bizarro amazing).

When I saw Tiphani’s initial tweet, I thought back to a time when I hated myself. Not only did I not like who I was, but I was convinced that no one else would, should, or could love me. I was certain that my actions had made me unlovable.

I’d like to tell you that I clawed my way out of that dark hole of shame by realizing that I had an internal value that couldn’t be tainted by temporary actions. But that’s not at all what happened.

Four women loved me when I couldn’t love myself.

These four women, women who are more like sisters than girlfriends, knew all of my mistakes, and they loved me still. They didn’t love me in spite of myself; they loved all of me. They showed me compassion and empathy, and they wrapped their arms around me when I was convinced that no one should.

I was lucky, because these four women were – are – some of the most honorable, wonderful, admirable people I know. They are people I want to be more like, so it meant a lot to me to have them love me. It suggested to me that I was worth it.

It helped me believe my husband when he also said he still loved me.

And that helped me believe other friends, other noble women and men, when they told me they loved me.

Being Loved Is Just the First Step

I watched Muriel’s Wedding this weekend for the first time. It’s the story of a woman who isn’t loved very much by anyone and who doesn’t love herself much either. And then, of course, she reinvents herself.

At one point, Muriel is sitting in the dark with a new friend, and she’s talking about how hard it is to be nothing. Her new friend says, “You’re not nothing Muriel! You’re amazing!” And she says it with such conviction that you just know this is going to be a turning point in the movie.

I immediately whipped out my iPhone and made a note of this quote, thinking it would be perfect to include in a post about how friends can love us until we love ourselves.

And then, Muriel doesn’t really change on the inside. She gets a haircut, loses some weight, and moves away from her horribly abusive family. But she is still very broken on the inside and very desperate for validation from the outside world.

This is totally ruining my post, I thought.

But the movie, ironically, was more accurate than the post I’d planned or the pithy mantras we hand out to each other on the Internet.

My friends loved me, and that provided me with social proof that I was worthy of love and forgiveness. But I also spent a crap ton of time in therapy, and that was the work only I could do to figure out what I was worth.

The reality is that you can be loved even if you don’t love yourself.

Being loved can be like training wheels for loving yourself.

But what the Facebook graphics should really say is that the love of others isn’t a substitute for loving yourself. Loving yourself is another step forward, one that you have to take alone, when you’re ready.

However, I will always, always be grateful for the people who loved me before I loved myself. They showed me it was possible.

Last summer, my little brother Jay was sentenced to 30 years in prison for robbing banks. It was, as you can imagine, heartbreaking for everyone who loves him. Since his sentencing, we’ve all had to work on coming to terms with this new version of normal. We’ve had to practice letting go of what we imagined for the future and accepting what is right now.

That acceptance was tested recently when my brother’s ex-girlfriend – the mother of my beloved nephew – got engaged.

I found out about the engagement through a text from my mom. My first instinct was to grieve a little.

I couldn’t help it. I thought of what might have been. I thought of my brother and everything he’d lost – everything he’d thrown away. I thought of the wedding he wouldn’t have and the family he wouldn’t raise.

While my stomach rolled over all the memories my brother wouldn’t make, my mom sent me another text.

“I’m really happy for her.”

And she was. I knew that she was. And I knew that I was, too. I was happy for her because the man she’s going to marry is a wonderful, kind, and loving man. He’s a good guy, and I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather have standing in as a father for my nephew. I’m thrilled that they are taking these steps to solidify their family.

I told Jared, and I could see in his eyes that he instantly thought of Jay. I love him for that, but I reminded him – reminded both of us, really – that this is good news. This is good news for where we all are now.

I sent a message to Bre and let her know that I was genuinely happy for her. I admitted, too, that my heart hurt a bit at first, and that it might always go through that dance when milestones like this come up. She was incredibly compassionate, a trait I’m always glad to see in my nephew’s mother.

But, she also reminded me that she couldn’t live in the shadows of “what could have been.”

I’m glad to see that in Jude’s mom, too.

This is life moving on. This is us moving down the path we’re on, doing our best to be more grateful for the blessings here and less obsessed with the roads we didn’t take.

This is acceptance in progress.

When tragedy strikes in today’s hyper-connected world, we responded predictably. We hug our children, donate blood, buy blankets, and talk about how things like this make you remember what’s important.

And then we forget.

The next shooting, bombing, hurricane, or tornado hits, and we’re reminded again of how precious our loved ones are, how small our obsessions with stuff and status.

And then we forget.

By my calculation, it takes about a week for our compassion to fade and our perspective to shift back to pre-tragedy levels. Even after a week filled with multiple heartaches, it took less than 10 days before I started reading about someone offending someone else with relatively unimportant words. At least, the words would have been deemed unimportant the previous week.

It’s funny what we consider important once our news feeds stop flashing pictures of bleeding people and unlikely heroes.

It’s not so funny, but easy to forget, that our news feeds aren’t the best indicator of whether or not there is tragedy in the world. The reality is that there is always someone bleeding, someone running to the rescue, and someone turning the other way. War, famine, and injustice are as common as poverty and cruelty.

There is always a reason to be grateful for what we have and to hold tighter to those we love.

But we can’t live with that in our faces all the time. We just can’t. Our hearts could not take it if we had to witness all the suffering of the world at all times. We would stop hugging our kids and curl up into balls of despair, or we would harden our souls completely in order to function.

No, the answer to keeping our perspective is not to wallow unceasingly in the horror.

The answer, I think, is gratitude.

That’s really why tragedy shifts our perspective. In the face of loss, we instinctively stop and count what remains, and we give thanks for it. And by doing so we remember what matters most to us, and we let go of what is not.

We can experience that same grounding every day. When we practice taking inventory every single day of the things that we treasure, we constantly pull our perspectives back to where we want them to be. We can do that in between the breaking headlines.

Do you have a gratitude practice?