If you've read my previous post about deciding to ditch Mama Guilt , you may be wondering how she and I got so close in the first place. For the longest time, I didn’t even realize this frenemy was part of my thinking. What I did know was that when I looked at my life, I knew it was (and still is) absolutely full of blessings to savor and celebrate. To feel sad seemed somewhere between silly and ridiculous. Yet so often, I just couldn’t shake a sense of low-grade, self-directed frustration. I knew my emotions were often incompatible with my circumstances, but nothing seemed to help: whether I talked about it, squelched it, prayed about it, tried to push through it, berated myself for it, or worked at cultivating gratitude, the sense of dis-ease lingered on. My inability to cajole myself out of these feelings only made things worse: I was even more frustrated, and pretty embarrassed, too. It seemed best—safest, really—to keep my feelings under wraps and