Being Human: The Beautiful, Messy Truth of Showing Up Every Day
There is a moment most of us know well. You wake up feeling not quite right and you can’t explain why. Heavy, flat, like the world has dimmed slightly overnight. Nothing particular happened. Yesterday was fine. But today feels harder than usual. Then, perhaps after a few days, something small happens, a good conversation, a flicker of late-afternoon light through the window, a meal that actually tastes good and you feel almost alive and like yourself again.
This is not dysfunction. This is not something to fix. This is what it means to be human.
The Emotional Weather System
We tend to think of our emotional lives as something we should be able to control. But human emotion is not a thermostat. It is a cycle. Like the weather, it is shaped by forces both visible and invisible: the quality of your sleep, the state of your relationships, the news cycle, a song that snuck up on you, a memory triggered by a smell, the particular angle of the season, being too busy, or not being busy enough.
On any given day, a person might move through grief and laughter within the same hour. Some may feel self-assured at breakfast and full of self-doubt by the afternoon. Others may love their life fiercely in the morning and feel very alone in the evening. None of this is in contradiction. All of it is the full, unedited experience of being alive; and being human is very messy.
Psychologists have mapped thousands of distinct emotional states. Everything from contentment to nostalgia, and anticipation to disappointment. While we tend to sort these loosely into "positive" and "negative," the reality is our emotions are a part of the human experience, and are constantly fluctuating throughout our lives.
The emotions we label as difficult are not enemies; they are messengers. They are the nervous system doing its job, flagging threats, registering losses, marking what matters to us. To be human is to receive all of these signals; and choosing what comes up for us day to day is a convenience our biology refutes.
The Myth of Constant “Okayness”
Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed an idea that functioning adults feel mostly fine, mostly calm, mostly together. That struggling is a sign of weakness, or a problem to be solved, rather than a natural rhythm of a life fully lived. Some people wear misery as a victim mentality; the ones you back away from and avoid because holding space for them becomes draining. Others are calm and stable, confident people who seamlessly move through all parts of life. Reality is, we all feel the feels as humans, but it is how we wear the tough emotions and how we handle this in our daily lives that determines our character.
Look honestly at the people you admire most. The ones who seem most genuinely alive. Chances are they are not the ones who never falter, but they are the ones who feel discomfort fully, and keep going anyway. They are the ones who cry at things, who get angry at injustice, who admit when they are scared, and who also find real joy in small things. Their richness comes not from emotional narrowness, but from emotional range and a key leadership skill of emotional regulation in the hardest moments. It is a super power to be able to regulate your emotions in the murkiness of being human.
The spectrum of human emotions is not a bug in the human brain, it is the whole point. We are built for depth, not apathy.
Doing Your Best, Whatever That Looks Like Today
The thing about doing your best is: it’s not the same effort every day. It can’t be.
Some days, your best is extraordinary. You are sharp, generous, energised, punching above your weight at work, your people and your community at full capacity. You make good decisions, say the right things, show up with your whole self. These are the days that feel easy.
But other days, your best is simply getting out of bed. Sending the email you've been avoiding. Being kind to someone when you had nothing left to give. Choosing rest instead of punishment. Maybe sharing that you are not OK today with someone you trust. These acts are not lesser. In context, they are sometimes the harder ones and they count every bit as much on the human-ness spectrum.
Doing your best is not a fixed standard. It is a commitment to self-reflection, being honest with yourself and having the emotional intelligence to ask yourself on those harder days, what can I do well today? A lot of people struggle with these questions, because they don’t like themselves or lack self-awareness about their place in the world.
This is not an excuse to skip out, be lazy or cruise. It is an invitation to be realistic and, in that realism, to be sustainable. A person who is great every single day cannot keep going for long. The person who shows up consistently, adjusting their pace to their reality, who rests without guilt and works without martyrdom, that is the person who goes the distance.
This matters far beyond the individual. When each person in a workplace commits to showing up for the right reasons on the hard days, without excuses and does their best, something happens collectively. Making the choice to turn up and be your best, rather than the person who systematically shares the latest drama with everyone. Simply offering, “not myself today” and getting on with what you can, quickly allows the brain and the collective mindset to shift gear. Life happens, but how it is handled in the workplace as a professional is what creates psychosocial safety.
When doing our best becomes a shared norm, workplaces feel different and productive, safe conversations can be heard. When teams understand that best is variable and humans are simply human, more workplaces become safer for everyone to be more honest. People stop masking their struggles until they become crises. They ask for help earlier. They extend more grace to others because they have learned to extend it to themselves. A psychosocially safe workplace is not one where everyone is always fine. It is one where the team understands that there are challenges ahead on a new project and there may be more meetings or more interactions required before individuals complete their tasks that all contribute to a well-oiled machine. Psychologically safe workplaces are aware of their peaks and troughs in productive capacity and plan accordingly. They discuss challenges and endeavour to problem solve these learnings for next time, where everyone is heard. Quite often, the answer is within a team member – if they have the opportunity to speak up and bounce ideas off others in a respectful environment. If your meetings are silent and there are no conversations either formal, informal, about success, or challenges, and collaborative problem solving, you should question the psychosocial safety of your workplace.
The Practice of Being Present with Yourself
Part of what makes being human so demanding is that we must do it continuously. There are no days off from being you! But there is a skill worth practising, which is simply noticing. Noticing where you are emotionally, without immediately trying to change it. Asking “What am I noticing right now?” not as a crisis to be managed, but as an act of honest self-attention. We rarely stop, breathe and notice or do a body scan. I know my left knee will ache from a mis-spent youth of downhill skiing, but it reminds me of how much I loved going over those moguls, and if I notice I need to move away from my desk to think and problem solve a current challenge that has been bugging me (and also move the old knee) rather than staring into the computer screen and getting stuck, that moment of notice is helpful. Maybe I am too stuck and I need to work on something else and come back to the problem or chat to a colleague for their fresh perspective to find what I am missing.
This kind of noticing creates space. It means the difficult emotions move through rather than lodge. It means the good ones are actually felt, rather than rushing past in the busyness. It makes you a more honest and authentic person to be around, because you are not performing an edited version of yourself, you are present.
As a clinician, I am always tapping into what is coming up for people. In a past life, I was criticised for asking that exact question “what is coming up for you right now?” in a closed leadership meeting. I was immediately criticised for being too soft, was berated and humiliated by one leader. My reason for asking that question had been to gain insight into how that new leader was tracking. I knew they had grown in confidence over the past year and was hoping to shift the conversation into a positive one to celebrate team wins. The person who berated me and the question, shut down that opportunity for reflection and hijacked the tone for the rest of the meeting. In the business of working with and empowering humans, with the purpose of learning from negative moments and finding the positive outcomes and growth, that meeting was no longer about people, but about a bottom line. We all walked out of that meeting, saying as little as possible.
It’s OK and normal to have a bad day, it’s not OK to take it out on others. The key to psychosocial safety is staying regulated and to remain curious with appropriate and well-placed questions rather than shutting down hard conversations when difficult emotions arise.
A Note Worth Remembering
We will not get every day right. As humans, we will lose our patience, miss the mark, feel things we wished we did not feel, and fail to feel things we thought we should have. We will have times where showing up feels monumental, and times where it feels easy and light.
All of it, every uneven, unpredictable, wildly varied bit of those emotions, is what being human looks like. Not the highlight reel. Emotions are not linear. Being human is messy and all over the place.
So do your best today. Not yesterday's best, not your theoretical best, not anyone else's best. Just yours. Right now. Whatever that honestly is.
That is more than enough. And remember to stay awesome!
