A while back, our rather rotund yet devastatingly handsome cat was diagnosed with stress. Yes, stress. T’Challa (whose daily routine consists of sleeping on a soft blanket in the sun, snacking on gourmet cat treats and being fed second supper every night, being praised for his exquisite chonkiness, and being loved just a little more than the household humans) was apparently not thriving emotionally. My husband was furious. He spent an entire evening ranting to the cat after the vet gave us a bill the size of a small country’s GDP, which came with instructions for a special diet, a personalised feeding station, and a printout explaining feline anxiety. “You don’t get to be stressed,” he told the cat, “you’re a cat. You don’t pay bills or cook meals. Because you’re a cat!” But T’Challa, despite his luxury lifestyle, was not okay.

And that, apparently, is okay.

At least, that’s what we were all told during the pandemic. It’s okay not to be okay. Blogs, memes, inspirational talks wrapped us in a warm, fuzzy blanket of communal emotional collapse. But for me, there was one small, rather uncomfortable problem.

I was okay.

While others were battling cabin fever, I was enjoying the chance to force my teenage children to spend time with each other, and rather miraculously, with us. With nowhere to go they grudgingly played Scrabble, read books aloud, and even cleaned out a cupboard or two. We disinfected groceries together like a dystopian family bonding activity. Of course I faced some challenges, like reinventing the schooling system and trying to look professional on my video lesson while my son wandered past in nothing but a bath towel. But overall, I coped. Even when I it became apparent that I’d never learn to bake bread or make pineapple beer. And the more I realised I was coping, the more I started to feel like I wasn’t allowed to.

This is the paradox: while “it’s okay not to be okay” has become a mantra of our times (and not necessarily a bad one), it sometimes feels like being okay is now a bit… suspect.

Post-pandemic, this mindset seems to have stuck. In a world still smarting from collective trauma, resilience is side-eyed suspiciously. Coping is interpreted as denial. Strength is seen as emotional repression. Social media certainly doesn’t help. It rewards pain with validation, and the more public the breakdown, the more applause it garners. In that economy, there’s little space for calm functionality. People who are coping start to doubt themselves. They begin mining their own minor frustrations for something performatively broken, lest they seem emotionally disengaged.

Right now, I’m starting to experience crippling anxiety about not being crippled by anxiety.

Being okay does not mean being unfeeling. It doesn’t mean you didn’t struggle. It just means you’ve adapted. Emotional health shouldn’t have to scream for attention to be recognised as real. We need to stop thinking that the only valid response to hardship is devastation followed by a phoenix-like rebirth in a TED Talk.

Resilience doesn’t mean denial. It doesn’t mean you're untouched by what’s happened. What it does mean is that you’ve absorbed the blow and kept going. That should be celebrated, not questioned.

Mental health advocacy has opened an important space for vulnerability, but if we’re not careful, we risk replacing one stigma with another. Instead of “don’t talk about it,” we are moving towards “you must always talk about it, and it must always be dramatically devastating.” We needed to change the script, because it seems like suffering has become the only socially acceptable emotion. Some people just keep going, and this shouldn’t be seen as suspicious or callous. It might even be healthy.

I’ll admit there are still days when I want to crawl into a hole and hide or move to a small European village and work as a postman under an assumed name, but those days pass. They’re outnumbered by the ones where I look around at my mostly functional family, my mismatched furniture and my crumb-covered kitchen, and realise that life is actually pretty good, even if I have to stifle my sneezes lest I stress T’Challa.

And that’s okay too.