I have had mixed feelings about my feelings for as long as I can remember.

My first experience with feelings I don’t remember, but I know it exists as a foundation, and it’s important: when I was baby and I expressed my feelings, I got cared for. I know this because I have a good mother, who still takes care of me at every opportunity.

My first memories of dealing with feelings are mixed. I do remember running to my mother for comfort when I was scared or upset, which usually manifested in tears. I also remember being accused by my older siblings of faking the crying in order to manipulate my mother’s attention, and I remember learning to swallow the sobs. 

Growing older, I learned from my dad the importance of self-control. Uninhibited emotional expression, regardless of whether we were overly excited or overly cross, was not welcome. We were allowed to have feelings, but not to let them control us, and especially not to stomp over other people with them.

By the time I was a teenager, I had two often-conflicting beliefs about my feelings:

One: my feelings were not to be trusted. Expressing them too much would make people not like me. Most of the words and actions that I was embarrassed to remember were borne out of impulsively acting out my emotions. 

Two: my feelings were the only validation that something mattered. The true test of if something was important was if I couldn’t control and hide my feelings about it. 

I got older, and the first belief had more power over my life than the second. Eventually I started thinking that things might be better if I had no feelings. What was even the point of them? They certainly weren’t a great guide of actions, which seemed to be the most common use I witnessed. 

I started asking that question more and more, in all seriousness. What is the purpose of feelings?

Someone told me that feelings are indicators. Like the lights on a car dashboard. Trying to give you information on what’s going on within you.

This kind of made sense to me, but it felt like not enough. And it failed to convince me that my life wouldn’t be better without them.

And then in a Morgan Housel book, I read that feelings are motivators. Not in the “you should do whatever you feel” way, but in the “feelings are the only reason anyone does anything” way.

And that clicked. 

No one actually wants any of the things we say we want, he wrote (kind of, I’m paraphrasing wildly). What we actually want is how we think having those things will make us feel. 

That felt true. 

It gave me an appreciation of why feelings exist for the first time in years.

But then something else happened: it became difficult for me to set goals – to feel desire.

Now, I’ve never been tremendously good at dreaming. I’ve been good at appreciating what I have, or that’s what I told myself.

Here’s a thing: Appreciation for what you have while you have it feels a lot more enjoyable than wanting things you don’t have, actually.

Here’s another thing: You can spend a long time telling yourself you’re content with what you have, when what you actually are is afraid to ask for more because you don’t believe you can have it, and you don’t want to be disappointed. 

This is not good. 

This is operating out of fear.

This eventually causes a brittle layer of quiet self-hate to form over your heart, especially as you watch other people get more. Usually this is just because they had the audacity to ask for it, but you’ll want to tell yourself it’s because there’s something lacking in you. 

Which there is. 

The audacity to ask.

The courage to be disappointed.

This was my problem. It wasn’t that understanding the role of emotion in goal-setting actually made it more difficult for me to set goals; it was that it gave me another reason to intellectualize not asking for more. 

It went something like this: “You say you want X, but what you actually want is the feeling you think X will bring you, so how about you just figure out how to have the feeling right now and save yourself the time and effort of trying to get X?”

It resulted in paralysis, in a feeling of not knowing what I want or how to move. 

It wasn’t helpful. 

But here’s the thing: whatever the purpose of feelings is, I don’t think the purpose of life is to pursue only good feelings. If I start chasing the happy mood, I become the thing I despise: controlled by my feelings.

So then what if feelings aren’t intended to be the final product – they’re intended to be the fuel?

Even though desire for this feeling is the thing that gets me to move, the purpose of the desire isn’t to get the feeling as quickly as possible so I can stop moving – it’s actually just to get me to move, to participate in life.

I’m not designed to just hold still and have happy feelings.

And when I try, it’s almost always more about self-protection than it is about appreciation.

I’m meant to move. To change. To look for more. 

Part of the good life, for me, is believing it’s getting better. 

Not because what I have isn’t good enough for gratitude already, but because this life is bigger than I have yet imagined, and I was designed to be curious about how far I can go.