These days I find myself tuned into social media in a way I once swore I never would be. Aside from the obvious mind-numbing drain that comes from time spent online, I do find nuggets of gold in there — interesting teachings that I “save for later” so I can dive in, explore, and figure out the validity of those insights.
Outside of grappling with my own addiction to social media, I’m working to create more space between myself and the entrapments of sensationalized attention-grabbing tactics. I’ve been thinking about these incredibly rich teachings that are spread across platforms, absorbed in the five seconds of attention we give them.
So many of these “teachings” are learnings that can take decades to explore and digest. But on social media, everything happens now, we can heart something or share it and move on. There’s no space to truly ingest these ideas, no years of exploration. They become verbiage we share with friends when someone is going through something difficult, a quick quote that rings hollow because we don’t actually know its meaning.
We’ve reduced spiritual practices to a five-second snapshot — years of hard work, of developing the tolerance to stay when things feel difficult, of digging into the dark when things are painful, flattened into a shareable post. Even in our workplaces, constructive feedback is sparse and feared. We’re so scared of hearing anything that doesn’t make us feel light and fluffy, anything that doesn’t contribute to our happiness.
Yet it’s the avoidance of hard feelings — that has created this very territory of fragility. So many of us lack the tolerance for discomfort. There’s fear around being imperfect, yet no one is perfect. So, we run hard toward generous acknowledgements of who we are, while staying scared to evolve beyond who we’ve been, even when who we’ve been no longer serves us.
We hide behind our fear of not being perfect, working ourselves to the bone trying to achieve it. We’re sold mountains of products to fill that fantasy — working hard for money, success, popularity, beauty, a body we’ll never achieve, spending fortunes on supplements to manage the side effects of a lifetime of chasing.
I saw a friend post something on social media along the lines of: “If it’s meant for you, it should make you feel really happy and special.” Let me share something with you — I’ve had many things in my life that were, in hindsight, 100% meant for me, and they did not make me feel happy or special. They broke me. They tore apart my reality and showed me how chasing perfection was the very cause of my suffering.
Let me share a personal journey. When I started my business, I built it out of deep passion. I wanted to share yoga and expand on its teachings in a way that could support a community and bring people together — a hub of deep work and self-exploration, a space of practice we could all anchor ourselves to as we explored this human experience in our own ways. This probably sounds like a blissful endeavor. In truth, it was the very opposite.
It turns out that every part of me that needed to evolve and grow would be pushed to its limits until I succumbed to my unhealthiest patterns. The controlling parts of me took a big hit — the ways I believed everything had to be a certain way all had to be untangled. It took years of learning through difficulty in my working relationships, through drama and struggle so intense that I wanted to make the business wrong, to decide the only resolution was to leave. But I didn’t. Year over year, I slowly healed these self-defeating patterns. I continued to study yoga. I did deep personal work. Between my spiritual practice and the support of therapists, I grew in ways nothing else in life could have taught me. Holding space for others, being accountable, showing up when it’s hard — year after year — that built me. I didn’t walk away, and let me tell you, there were years — especially through the pandemic — when I really wanted to.
But now I can honestly say that all of those years of struggle were worth it. I wouldn’t have said that during them. In hindsight, though, that struggle is what brought me freedom from my own suffering. I blamed a lot of people along the way — my boundaries were nonexistent, and not everything was my fault (that’s important to name clearly) — but the work was always mine. I had to battle for myself. I had to stay so I could become who I am today.I had to learn how to find peace, because I had never been given that teaching in my life. Now my life looks monumentally different. I feel genuine gratitude for my business — for how it grew me, for the necessity of dismantling who I was in order to become who I am. Metamorphosis isn’t for the faint of heart. But it will make you more resilient — more capable of sitting with your own discomfort rather than running from it.
I’m not sharing this because my story is unique. I’m sharing it because I suspect it isn’t.
How many of us have been unconsciously driving our lives? When we distill life down to something so simple as “if it’s meant for you, it should make you feel special,” we fall into the trap of individualism — the need to make everything Pollyanna, to shake off anything hard because it doesn’t feel good. We’re not meant to feel good all the time, and yet that’s exactly what multi-billion dollar brands sell us. They profit from our sense of imperfection, offering a “solution” if we just buy what they’re selling.
This conditions us to believe that if something is meant for us, it should feel effortless and magical — as if the universe is conspiring just to make us feel special. That, my friends, is a form of gaslighting ourselves. We end up pushing away anything tricky or hard, and we’re left with little resilience or capacity to face difficulty.
We shy away from hard things — including our own growth and evolution. Instead of moving toward challenges, we veer away and end up in an endless loop of suffering, avoiding the very things that are meant to help us grow. When we do that, we keep driving the same road, going to the same places, not noticing anything around us. Habit is driving us; we’re not even seeing the scenery.
I spent years in a business that broke me open, and I would have missed all of it if I’d listened to the voice that said “this doesn’t feel good, so it must not be for you.” The most transformative things in my life arrived disguised as the wrong thing. As the hard thing. As the thing I wanted to run from. So, when something arrives that doesn’t feel effortless or magical — before you turn away, get curious. The discomfort might just be the door.
Real growth rarely arrives with fanfare. It comes in the middle of the night, in the argument you didn’t want to have, in the year you almost quit. It comes dressed as the wrong thing, at the wrong time, making you feel all the wrong feelings. And yet — there it is. The very thing that was always meant for you, waiting on the other side of your willingness to stay.
So the next time you see something on social media telling you that life should feel magical and effortless — pause before you heart it and move on. Before you let it quietly reinforce the belief that you deserve only ease, that hard means wrong, that discomfort is a sign to leave. You know now that none of that is true. The most important things rarely feel like gifts when they arrive. That’s not a reason to turn away.
That might be the most important reason to stay.
love, Noelle