Brad Stulberg

Whenever someone talks to me about the internet and like, oh, you know, you told me to be vulnerable.

Like I want to be vulnerable to connect with people.

I'm like, no, no, no.

Like you're trying to use it as an asset.

It'll come on its own.

You know when to be vulnerable?

Like when you don't want to share something, that's the thing that then you should share.

In simple terms, it's the ability to hold two competing strong emotions at once.

So joy and despair, life and death, anger and love.

And it's an extremely counterintuitive thing, but the more that we can embrace the full catastrophe of all these emotions...

the more free we become, because we don't resist the bad.

And this is the that I learned in my OCD therapy, because if you try to resist something, it just gets stronger.

Whereas if you can say like, oh, there's sadness,

Sadness is here.

Sadness hurts.

It's okay to be sad.

Then it takes the edge off the sadness.

And when you experience happiness, you're not scared to be happy.

You can fully experience happiness.

So it's this ability to be flexible within the course of a year, a week, a day, even within the course of an hour, to be able to have a wave of sadness, let it course through you, feel it, and then be really happy.