This question, or variants of it — “Will I be ok?”, “Are you sure you’re going to be ok?”, “Tell me everything will be fine / will work out / will be ok” — are uttered every day. We know them well. We get a feeling — fear, perhaps — and we want reassurance. In my household, we did this a lot. I remember asking my mom all the time if things were going to be ok, and her reassuring me that, of course, they will.

31 years on this planet, and I guess things are “ok” — and every time I doubted whether or not I would be ok, I always turned out “ok”? And that’s what has gotten me interested in thinking more about what it means to be “ok” and it’s opposite — maybe, “not ok”?

“Ok” doesn’t mean happy, or great — it’s less than that. It means fine, or maybe content, or neutral — neither very bad or very good. Of course, when we want to know if things will be ok, or if we will be ok, the alternative we are concerned about is not that things will be amazing, but that — at least in my case — they will be catastrophically bad. Have you heard about this phrase, catastrophizing? It’s a good one.

I catastrophize. I suffer from perfectionism. The slightest possibility that things could go pear shaped, that they would admit some kind of risk would send me reeling. Pure panic. Not about all things, of course, but those things that really effect what I value — my privacy, my freedom, my time — things I guard so closely I am AFRAID of their being compromised. I’m afraid that if they are compromised, then I somehow won’t be ok.

But what does it really mean? If I am not ok, then what am I? Am I hurt, physically or mentally? Am I injured? Am I dead? Am I crying? Am I experiencing intense negative emotions that I wish I weren’t — I think it’s mostly the latter.

See, most of the things I (and my mind) am afraid of cannot hurt me — not in a physical way. The things that scare me can mostly just make me very uncomfortable mentally. There is no true risk — for me, again — of bodily injury. There is just a perceived future where I am not ok, where things are not ok.

But what I’ve learned, and what I hope to learn even better/righter/faster/stronger, is that short of injury and death, not ok doesn’t really exist. All those moments in the future that I fear, all those feelings and thoughts that I hope I don’t meet in the future — are just what they are — moments, thoughts and feelings.

Yes, it’s possible that they might/will be unpleasant. But they (thoughts, feelings) only live in my brain. They have no way of truly hurting me. There is no risk to having them. And, importantly, they are fleeting — just like the good times fade, so do their unhappy cousins.

So I’ve been thinking, what does it mean to be not ok? Not much.*

*I don’t mean to minimise psychological suffering. Indeed, I know how much it can hurt. I just mean to say that sometimes reassurance seeking for a future that doesn’t involve hard feelings/emotions might be misguided, and might also serve to make them scarier — since we are buying in to the fear, believing it, we may be adding energy to something that doesn’t deserve so much of our attention. See Reid Wilson’s Pendulum idea in Stopping the Noise in Your Head.