I could spend all my worldly wealth on books that teach me the best way to be happy. I could plaster my room with cute, kitschy, and ultimately meaningless little posters telling me to think positive. I could continue learning how, as an American in a culture where feelings are shameful, to put away my grief, my confusion, my anger in favor of constant complacency and contentment that’s as artificial as an airbrushed photo.

Or I could stop buying into the bullshit.

I’ll admit that I’m much more logical than I am emotional, but the way our culture treats what it calls “negative” emotions seems not only unrealistic but destructive. For starters, we love to pretend that they don’t exist. When we grudgingly to admit that yes, people get sad, people get angry, people hurt, we look for ways to make these feelings as short-lived and shallow as we can.

The self-help book industry, most mainstream religions, and those god-awful peppy and positive people (the ones who use the phrase “Debbie Downer”) tell us that sadness is to be gotten over as quickly as possible, anger is, by necessity violent and hurtful, and crying, shouting, or saying “Bloody awful” in response to “How are you?” is taboo.

I can’t think of a better way to erase our humanity.

There’s no platitude that fixes pain. There’s no hallmark sympathy card that erases the void when a friend leaves, no five-step process that makes failure feel better. Pain just is. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that everyone suffers.

And there is no shame in it.

There is no shame in unhappiness. For whatever reason, or for no reason, there is no shame in sad eyes and wanting to talk too much or not at all.

We classify things as “enough to cry over” or “not a big deal.” We bite back our anger because confrontation is messy and scary. We fear that we look unprofessional, that we’re wasting our lives if we dwell on old wounds, that we won’t be loved and wanted unless we can handle everything, all the time. And we hold everything in, creating a metaphorical witch’s cauldron of percolating feelings.

I love all the people in my life whether they’re happy or sad. I love them when they’re angry, I love them when they’re obviously having a hard time processing, but know that something is up. And I trust that they love me when I’m sobbing on their couches, when I’m ranting about something that went wrong in my life, when I’m quiet because I’m too exhausted to talk.

You don’t have to be happy all the time, and neither do I. We are worthy of love and respect when we’re frustrated and hard to be around. We have value when we’re anxious and afraid.

And those feelings have value, too.

Anger brings change and proves that we are passionate and alive.

Sadness proves how much something mattered, marks a change, allows us to reflect on what we had.

Fear helps us gauge risk and makes moving forward exhilarating.

Just because these feelings are difficult to understand and process, because they hurt, because they make us something less than perfect, efficient, digital age robots, doesn’t mean that we should fold them smaller and small until they go away. They serve a purpose, and whether we like it or not, they exist.

When we hide our sadness, we feel alone, and we make the sad person next to us feel alone. We isolate ourselves by refusing to admit that we suffer, that everyone suffers, that we cannot, by sheer force of will, make suffering go away. To suffer is not to be weak. To suffer is to be alive.

So I don’t buy the self-help books. Instead, I write bad poetry when I’m sad, burn sage, and tell myself that I’ll stop crying when I stop crying and not before. I clean and blast punk music when I’m angry and wear myself out until I can be rational again, without chastising myself. If I snap at someone, I apologize later and mean it. I don’t call the time I spend in the throes of these feelings a waste. This is the business of being human.

I don’t live a painless existence, and I wouldn’t want to. I certainly won’t fake living such a neat, clean, meaningless life for the sake of appearance. Our time on this earth is too short to pretend not to care.