Misery Loves Company (But What it Really Wants is a Witness)

By 10 a.m. on Thanksgiving, I had already argued about several things including, absurdly, the patriarchy. It was one of those mornings where everything inside felt tight, and any small pressure made something in me bristle. My partner has four days off, which is wonderful, but I could feel myself trying to be someone I wasn’t in that moment - trying to be lighter, easier, more “holiday.”

The truth was: I wasn’t okay.
This is my first holiday without my mom.
Grief was sitting just under my skin, quiet but insistent.

There was also the familiar contraction around food, overindulgence, and the Day of Mourning woven into the holiday. A confusion of emotional currents. A heaviness I kept trying to outrun.

Around 3 p.m., before we left to see friends, I finally stopped.
Stopped trying to rise above it.
Stopped trying to “fix my frequency.”
Stopped arguing with myself.

And I made a decision:
I am miserable today. And I’m going to let myself be miserable.

Not collapsing into it.
Not projecting it onto anyone else.
Just letting myself be honest.

I could hear my spiritual ego chiming in warning me about staying in “low vibration” and reminding me of manifestation and all the ways I “should” self-correct. But a deeper truth, the one I’ve learned again and again, came through:

Presence heals.
Presence ends separation.

And separation consciousness is the real source of suffering.

So I sat down with my misery like it was a visitor at my table.
I said quietly,
“Fine. Come sit with me. I’m not sending you away.”

And something softened.

Not because I rose above it,
but because I finally stayed with myself.

When I brought the misery into my heart, like a small animal seeking shelter, like a child needing warmth- its edges loosened. It stopped demanding. It simply rested. And as it rested, I did too.

Later, with our friends, there was actually space inside me again.
Enough space for laughter.
Enough space for a quiet tear or two when a song my mom would have loved floated through the playlist.  Enough space for a whole lot of gratitude. 

Being present with my misery opened that access.
Not bypassing.
Not controlling.
Just presence.

Many of us were raised with the opposite conditioning:
Don’t cry.
Don’t feel too much.
Don’t make things uncomfortable.
Vulnerability is weakness.

The residue of that conditioning still lives in the body.

But presence, gentle, compassionate presence, untangles it. 
Presence lets us be human.
Presence lets truth move through.
Presence lets us feel without collapsing.

Misery doesn’t actually love company.
It loves companionship.
It loves being witnessed, met, allowed.

Yesterday reminded me of this:
I didn’t need anyone else to sit in my discomfort with me.
I needed me, as a loving witness, as a companion, as a presence.

And what I keep remembering is that presence is not passive.
It is an active ending of separation consciousness.

When I stayed with my misery instead of exiling it,
something in me rejoined itself.
A small reweaving.
A return to coherence.
A quiet coming home.

And maybe that’s the heart of healing - not transcendence, not perfection, not an escape into light,
but a simple togetherness:

the inner parts of us no longer abandoned,
no longer pushed away,
but welcomed back
into the field of our own love.