Will I Always Feel Like This?

My name's Mark, and you're listening to Headstraight. Hello, you lot, and welcome back. And today, I've got another question for you, and it's one that I hear a lot. And it's when people say to me, will I always feel like this? Now it's a simple question, but it usually comes after someone has been struggling for a while.

You're tired. You've had enough of feeling the same way. And maybe this has been going on for weeks or months, and at some point, the question starts to get bigger. You stop wondering how tomorrow might feel, and start wondering whether this is simply just how your life is now. Now what interests me is that most of us already know that feelings change.

You can probably remember a time when you felt completely different from how you feel today. You've laughed, enjoyed things, looked forward to stuff, got through entire days without constantly checking what was going on in your head. You know that version of you existed. But when you're right in the middle of a really difficult period, that knowledge can feel quite useless. And someone might remind you that you were doing well six months ago, and you know they're right.

You remember it perfectly. Yet somewhere inside, there's still that response. Yeah. But that was then. And that's the bit that I wanna look at.

How can you know that you've felt differently before and still find it almost impossible to imagine feeling differently again? Because I think that's where always starts creeping into the picture. The present gets so loud that it begins to fill in the future for you. And before long, you're asking the person you are today to predict the person that you'll be months or even years from now. And I'm not sure that that's a fair job to give them.

Whatever you're feeling right now has a huge advantage over anything that you might feel in the future. Because it's happening. You can experience it. You know exactly what it feels like. Now tomorrow doesn't have that kind of evidence yet.

So when you're trying to imagine what comes next, you naturally build the picture from what you already know. If today feels awful, tomorrow can start looking pretty similar. And if that happens often enough, the prediction stops feeling like a prediction and it starts feeling obvious. And I think that when someone offers you reassurance, that's why it can feel really weird. Someone might say, you won't always feel like this.

Now they're trying to help, and you might desperately want to believe them as well, but you can still have another thought underneath this. How do you know? And, actually, that's a really fair question. From where you're standing, you've got the evidence. You know what yesterday was like, and you know how today feels.

But what you don't have is anything from next month. When life's going pretty well, we tend to accept that. We know that things move around. We know that plans change, that people surprise us, that things go wrong, and other things work out. But uncertainty feels very different when you're already struggling.

The presence starts carrying far more weight because it's the only thing that you can actually experience. And that makes it incredibly convincing. Now I think there's something quite strange about remembering yourself feeling completely different. You can remember what happened. You know where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.

You might even have a photograph from that time. But sometimes you can look at that version of yourself and genuinely wonder how you were doing it. How were you getting up and going to school without thinking about all of this? How were you going out and enjoying yourself? How did any of that feel normal?

You remember being okay. You just can't quite imagine how you can get from where you are now back to being there. That's why when somebody tells you, but you felt better before, doesn't necessarily solve anything because you probably already know that. Now the memory isn't the problem. It's the distance.

That earlier version of you can feel strangely remote, while the person that you are today feels completely real. And I think that tells us something about the power of the present. It can make every other version of us feel less convincing, even versions that we know existed. So perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that future versions of ourselves are also difficult to imagine because we haven't met them yet. Now after enough difficult days, I think something starts to shift without us really noticing it.

I feel awful today becomes this keeps happening. And once something has been happening for long enough, you can eventually arrive at this is just how things are now. Now that feels completely understandable. If anxiety turns up every morning for weeks, you're gonna expect it tomorrow. If your mood has been low for months, another difficult day doesn't feel surprising anymore.

You've spotted a pattern. The tricky bit comes when that pattern starts telling you what happens next. Now this rarely feels like a prediction. It feels much more solid than that. It can feel like you've finally worked something out about yourself and your life.

But life isn't standing still while all of this is happening. Circumstances move. Relationships change. You understand things differently. Sometimes the movement is so slow that you barely notice it, and sometimes something changes that you genuinely didn't see coming.

Now, none of that gives us a guarantee about what happens next. It just means that there's a gap between saying this has been happening for a long time and deciding that you already know how the story ends. And I think that we cross that gap surprisingly easily when we're exhausted. Now, I've heard people say this so many times. I know I've been through bad periods before, but this just feels different.

And I think there's a good reason for that. When you look back at something difficult from your past, you already know what happened next. You know where that period sits in your life now. You can see what changed afterwards and roughly where the ending was. But you couldn't do that whilst you were living it.

At the time, you were simply in it. You got through one day and then you dealt with the next one. There wasn't necessarily some clear sense of where it was all heading. But the thing is, memory gives us a view that we didn't have at the time. We can look back and say, that was where things started to get really bad, or things started changing round about then.

The story has some shape now. The current struggle that you have doesn't. You don't know whereabouts you are in it because there's no marker telling you. And that makes the present feel very different from the difficult periods that you can already see from the other side. So if someone says, this time feels different, I don't see there's much point in arguing with them.

Because of course it does. They're inside this one, and being inside something is very different from looking back on it afterwards. Now one of the things that I think happens when someone has been struggling for a while is that the future starts to get smaller. When life feels fairly steady, there's usually space ahead of you. You don't know exactly what the year will look like, but that's normal.

There's room for people that you haven't met, things that you haven't discovered, and decisions that you haven't made. But when you're struggling, that sense of space can disappear. Tomorrow starts looking like today. Next week looks similar. The next month gets pulled into this as well.

And before long, you're not really imagining the future. What you're doing is stretching out the present. And I think that's what someone can mean when they say, I just can't see things getting any better. They genuinely can't see it from where they're standing. And when there's no picture of anything different, the future can start feeling closed.

And that makes today even heavier because now you're carrying much more than what's happening right now. You've also got the imagined versions of next week, next month, and everything after that sitting on top of it. A difficult period becomes a forecast. And that's when forever can start feeling incredibly believable. But being unable to picture anything different doesn't give us access to what's actually happening next.

All it does is tell us something about how difficult it is to see beyond where we are now. And this is where I think looking backwards can become interesting. Think about yourself a year or two ago. How much of the life that you have now could that version of you genuinely have predicted? Probably not very much.

There might be people who are really important to you now who weren't even around then. Something that you care about might have started completely by accident. Other things that you once thought were incredibly important might not matter anymore now. Life moves like that all the time, and the strange thing is, afterwards, it can all look fairly obvious. We join the dots once the dots already exist.

But when we look forwards, we somehow expect ourselves to see the dots before they're even there. And I think that's a really big demand to place on yourself at the best of times. When you're struggling, it becomes even harder because you're trying to imagine the future from a point where the present is already taking up so much space. You're trying to picture a version of yourself that you haven't become yet. Of course, the picture has gaps in it.

It always has. So when someone says, I can't see things being any different, I think there's a question worth asking underneath that. How often have any of us really been able to see our lives clearly before we've actually lived them? Now there's one word that jumps out at me in this question, and it's the word always. When someone asks, will I always feel like this?

I doubt they're actually picturing themselves at 40 or 60 years old and making some careful judgment about their emotional state. I think always often appears because they can't see an end. And when you can't see the end of something, it can start to feel endless. And those ideas are very easy to confuse. You don't know when something is gonna change, so after a while, that lack of an answer starts feeling like an answer in itself.

This is just how it's going to be. There's a certainty in that sentence. It might be a bleak certainty, but sometimes that still feels easier than admitting I genuinely don't know. Because I don't know leaves things unfinished. There's no date to aim for, no guarantee that next week is different.

You're still stuck with uncertainty. But uncertainty leaves some space as well. And I think forever can sometimes be what fills that space when we're exhausted by not knowing. It takes something that hasn't ended yet and gives it a conclusion. The difficulty is that we're reaching that conclusion from somewhere in the middle, and the middle is probably the place where we have the least amount of information.

So what do you actually do when the question turns up again? Will I always feel like this? I'm not convinced that you even have to answer it. Trying to convince yourself that everything will be fine might help sometimes. On other days, it won't even touch the sides.

Now I think there can be more value in noticing what the question tells you about where you are. If forever feels completely believable, then the present is probably taking up a huge amount of space. You might genuinely be unable to picture things being different at the moment, and you can be honest about that. I can't see it right now. There's room in that sentence.

You can still hate how things feel. You can still be tired of it and wish that things were completely different. You just don't have to turn today into an answer about the rest of your life. Because when we're struggling, our minds can race ahead very quickly. A difficult day suddenly becomes a question about next month, next year, and what all of this means for the person that we're becoming.

And that's a huge amount to carry. Sometimes we can come back to what we actually know. We know how things feel today, and we know what the recent past has been like. And after that, there are gaps. And as uncomfortable as those gaps can be, they haven't been filled in yet.

Now I want to finish with the person that you might be later. I don't mean some perfect version of you where everything has magically fallen into place. Just you Later. When you look backwards, there are versions of yourself that you couldn't have properly imagined beforehand. You only know them now because you lived your way into becoming them.

Looking forwards gives us the same problem. You're trying to imagine someone that you haven't met yet using only what you know today. Of course, the picture is incomplete, and perhaps that's why will I always feel like this is so difficult to answer. The person asking the question only has access to this point in the story. They can't know everything that comes next.

None of us can. So perhaps I don't know isn't such a useless answer. It doesn't promise that everything will be brilliant. It doesn't pretend that the way that you feel today doesn't matter. It simply leaves a little space for what hasn't happened yet.

And I think that's enough. Because when you think about who you might be in a year from now, I'm not sure today's version of you should be expected to already understand them. The reason is is because you haven't met them yet. So in the next episode, I have another question for you. So are you up for it?

Of course, you are.