The Sacred Tension: When Your Joy Feels Like Betrayal
If you've ever felt like a sociopath for enjoying your dinner while refugees starve, or questioned whether your therapy breakthrough matters when democracy is crumbling, this is for you.
Dear luminous rebel,
I'm writing this from my bedroom after a particularly difficult week spent handling my own interruptions in life (e.g., loss of a pet, my daughter having a minor surgery, our washing machine breaking leading to another leak off the house only to buy a new to us washer that then broke after 4 uses, and few challenging conversations with opinionated loved ones), while also holding space for clients often grappling with even bigger issues like death, divorce, climate change, and genocide.
And yet, there are simultaneously many moments I find myself loving the shit out of being alive and nearly moved to tears in a polar opposite fashion. Blissfully floating in the Gulf (of MEXICO), being wrapped up in Scott at night, hugging my children, or just seeing humans do really awesome human things with art, music, architecture, philanthropic work and more.
It feels like existential vertigo.
This is the particular hell of being awake in 2025: the simultaneous pull toward personal transcendence and collective grief. The way your nervous system ricochets between "the world is ending" and "my life is actually pretty fucking magical right now." Between the impulse to build something beautiful and the guilt that whispers you're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
If you've ever felt like a sociopath for enjoying your dinner while refugees starve, or questioned whether your therapy breakthrough matters when democracy is crumbling, this is for you.
The Guilt Vultures Are Circling
Between dealing with the washing machine saga and watching my daughter navigate her recovery, I've been acutely aware of a particular species of internal critic that shows up precisely when life gets messy. It whispers: You should be grateful for these small problems when others are facing war. Then, when I'm floating in the Gulf feeling pure bliss, it shifts tactics: How can you be this happy when your clients are struggling with real trauma?
These voices have gotten sophisticated over the years. They've learned to weaponize empathy, to make guilt sound like consciousness, to turn comparison into a spiritual practice. They know exactly how to make you question whether your joy somehow diminishes someone else's capacity for healing.
But here's what I've learned after fifteen years of doing this work: that voice is full of shit. Your happiness doesn't create someone else's suffering any more than your suffering creates someone else's happiness. The universe operates on abundance, not scarcity; connection, not competition.
The guilt merchants want you to believe that feeling good while others feel bad makes you morally deficient. But what if the opposite is true? What if your capacity to hold both grief and joy, struggle and celebration, makes you more useful to the world, not less?
The Overwhelm Trap of Caring Too Much
Here's what I see in my practice daily: brilliant, genuinely caring people who are drowning in their own empathy. They're legitimately heartbroken about climate change, genocide, inequality but unless they can find a way to care sustainably, they burn out in every manner imaginable and then what??
I’ve seen clients spiral into anxiety about melting ice caps (understandably so, mind you) while still needing to have a conversation with her toxic mother. Another spent hours researching genocide statistics while grappling with the depression that was slowly eating her alive.
This is where the overwhelm trap gets vicious: you genuinely care about massive, complex issues that you can't directly solve, so you carry them in your body like stones. You scroll through tragic headlines because staying informed feels like caring. You absorb every injustice because turning away feels like privilege. You mistake emotional overwhelm for moral responsibility.
But here's what actually happens: you become so saturated with pain that you can't function effectively in your own life, let alone create meaningful change in the world. You're drowning in care without the skills to channel it productively.
The woman who learns to process her own trauma while still donating to refugee organizations? Who sets boundaries around news consumption while staying engaged with local activism? Who tends to her mental health so she has capacity to show up for causes she believes in? She often gets criticized for "not caring enough" by people who mistake emotional saturation for social consciousness.
And I know, because I’ve been there. I once had a fellow helping professional accuse me of not doing enough here locally during the Black Lives Matter campaign because I didn’t show up to the protest or post often enough about it in her mind. I told her I was doing the work behind the scenes and one-on-one and I stand by that. We each have our aligned place.
Your Therapy Breakthrough Still Matters When Rome Burns
When my daughter was in post-op last week, I had one of those crystalline moments of understanding: my capacity to stay grounded and present for her while managing my own anxiety was directly proportional to the inner work I've done over the years. The meditation practice that seemed superfluous when I started it. The therapy sessions that felt indulgent compared to "real problems." The boundary work that others criticized as "too harsh/ egocentric/ avoidant.”
All of that personal development suddenly revealed itself as the most practical thing I'd ever done.
Because you can't give what you don't have. You can't hold space for others from a place of personal chaos. You can't create change from a foundation of unhealed trauma.
Your individual healing doesn't happen in some selfish vacuum separate from collective transformation. When you stop abandoning yourself to please others, you model healthy boundaries for every person who watches you. When you learn to feel your feelings without drowning in them, you teach others the same skill. When you build a life aligned with your values, you shift paradigms one decision at a time.
The mystics understood something our culture has forgotten: inner work and outer work are the same damn work. You can't heal the world from a place of personal fragmentation any more than you can pour from an empty cup. THAT IS RADICAL AUTONOMY.
The Revolutionary Potential of Unapologetic Aliveness
Floating in the Gulf last weekend, I had a realization that almost made me laugh out loud: the most subversive thing I could do in that moment was simply receive the beauty without guilt. To let the water hold me, to feel grateful for my body's ability to float, to be present for the perfection of that particular afternoon without immediately cataloging all the ways the world is broken.
This kind of presence terrifies systems that depend on your perpetual dissatisfaction. Because people who know how to receive joy are harder to manipulate. People who understand their own worth are harder to control. People who can feel genuine gratitude while also working for change are impossible to keep in the emotional hamster wheel of constant reactivity.
The powers that benefit from your exhaustion have spent decades perfecting the art of keeping conscious people overwhelmed. Overwhelmed people can’t create because they’re just trying to survive. Guilty people don't build because they’re too busy compensating. Martyrs don't revolutionize; they just suffer loudly while accomplishing very little.
But someone who has learned to metabolize both grief and joy? Who can hold heartbreak and celebration in the same breath? Who refuses to choose between personal fulfillment and social consciousness? That person becomes dangerous to every system that requires your diminishment to function.
Your unapologetic aliveness IS a form of resistance. Your refusal to shrink because others are struggling is a radical act. Your commitment to thriving while still caring deeply about justice threatens every narrative that depends on keeping good people small and guilty. And THAT, my friends, is our best weapon against every injustice.
The Complexity of Holding Both
Please hear me - you aren’t meant to choose between personal fulfillment and collective consciousness. Your challenge is to develop the emotional sophistication to hold both without losing your mind or your edge.
This means grieving genuinely for what's broken while building passionately toward what's possible. Feeling legitimate rage about injustice while cultivating legitimate joy in your own life. Acknowledging your privilege while refusing to shrink because of it.
Most people can't tolerate this level of complexity. They want you to pick a lane: either be perpetually guilty about your good fortune or be willfully ignorant about global suffering. Either be a spiritual bypasser who pretends everything is light and love, or be a professional victim who makes suffering your entire identity.
But the most powerful people I know have learned to live in the paradox. They can hold heartbreak and celebration in the same breath. They can feel genuine grief for collective trauma while experiencing genuine excitement about personal growth.
They understand that consciousness means expanding your capacity to feel everything more deeply, including joy.
The Invitation to Revolutionary Aliveness
So here's what I want to leave you with: your aliveness is NOT a betrayal of those who suffer. Your growth is NOT a theft from those who struggle. Your joy is NOT evidence of your callousness.
Your vitality is medicine this world desperately needs! Your expansion creates more space for others to expand. Your refusal to dim your light gives others permission to shine theirs.
The guilt vultures will keep circling, whispering their seductive lies about how your happiness hurts others. Let them. You have more important work to do than managing their discomfort with your aliveness.
Build your beautiful life. Create your aligned business. Heal your generational trauma. Love deeply, laugh freely, dream wildly. Do it all while staying engaged with the causes that matter to you, but do it from a place of overflow rather than depletion.
Because the world doesn't need more guilty martyrs carrying the weight of collective suffering until they collapse.
The world needs more people so rooted in their own authentic power that they become living proof of what's possible for us all.
With fierce love and unapologetic aliveness,
Tams
P.S. If this hit something deep, if you're ready to stop apologizing for your dreams while still fighting for the world you want to see, I have space for a few souls ready to do this integration work. Because mastering the art of revolutionary aliveness? That's the kind of rebellion this moment requires.
And for my paid subscribers, check out a guided meditation below to help bring more ease into this sacred tension.
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