What to Do When You Don’t Feel What You Think You Should

I had been dreaming about April for months, I was feeling excited about the possibilities. But that was about to change.

Not just any April. This April. My birthday month. The start of a new quarter. The year I step into what I’ve been calling the best decade of my life. My husband had asked me six months ago what I wanted to celebrate — six months of anticipating, planning, dreaming about something magical.

And then April 1st arrived.

Before I even got out of bed, a sadness started to creep over my soul like a slow, cold fog. I pulled myself up, went through my morning routine, poured my coffee, opened the Word — willing joy to show up like a light switch I could just flip on.

It didn’t.

The doubt came instead. Then confusion. Then, as the Kansas City rain tapped against the window and the sun stayed stubbornly hidden all week — almost as if it were quietly suggesting that maybe this birthday wasn’t such a big deal after all — the doubt turned into something heavier.

Fear. Condemnation. A grief I couldn’t quite name.

By the time Craig and I sat down to pray, I was a mess. I cried. I lamented. And then I got angry — because it’s my birthday month. I am not supposed to feel this way. I am supposedly entering the best decade of my life.

So why did I feel like I was falling apart?

When You Don’t Feel What You Think You Should Feel

Have you ever experienced the particular shock of not feeling what you expected to feel — and then gotten frustrated with yourself on top of it?

That’s exactly where I was.

And the questions started coming. I asked them of myself. I asked them of God. I let them surface one by one, unfiltered and uncomfortable:

• Has anything I have ever done actually mattered?
• Is what I’m working toward — the podcast, the 501c3, this business — even important?
• Who would listen to me?
• Why do I write, create content, and put myself out there week after week?
• Is it for You, God — or is it really for me?
• What do I have to offer?
• Have I missed You, God?
• Should I have been working a 9-5 all these years?
• Should I have gotten a degree?

Maybe you’ve never asked those exact questions. But I would guess you have your own version of them — the ones that surface on the hard days, in the quiet moments, when the life you’ve built suddenly looks blurry and you’re not sure it amounts to anything.

These are the questions that live underneath the surface of a lot of capable, faithful, hard-working women. And they deserve to be taken seriously — not stuffed back down because they feel ungrateful or faithless.

You Can’t Put On a Happy Face Forever

My first instinct was to do what I’ve always done: put on a happy face and spread sunshine until the feeling passed.

But I know better now.

Ignoring feelings of doubt and insecurity in hopes they’ll quietly disappear is not healthy. It is not wise. And it never actually works — it just delays the cost.

The braver thing — the harder thing — is to let yourself feel what you feel.

Dr. Katherine Hertlein puts it plainly: “Coming to grips with your feelings takes practice and courage, but it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself.”

If you’ve never had language for your emotions or a framework for processing them, I created a Feelings Toolkit specifically for this — a free resource to help you identify and give voice to what’s happening inside so it doesn’t run the show from the basement.

What I Did Instead of Spiraling

So there I sat — birthday crown untouched, rain on the window, doubts louder than they had any right to be.

And I made a choice.

Not to pretend. Not to perform. But to reach for the one tool I’ve come back to again and again in the hardest seasons of my life.

Gratitude.

Not the toxic positivity version — not “just be thankful, everything is fine.” The real kind. The kind that doesn’t demand you stop feeling the hard things, but refuses to let the hard things be the only thing.

I gave myself full permission to feel every bit of the sadness, the doubt, the frustration. And in the midst of it — not after it passed, but right in the thick of it — I chose gratitude as my lifeline.

Because I know this: it too will pass. It always does. And gratitude is what keeps me afloat while I wait.

Two Things Can Be True at Once

This is what I have learned about hard days — and what I want you to carry with you:

You can be in two places at once. You can acknowledge the weight of what is hard and be genuinely grateful. These are not opposites. They can exist in the same breath.

Here is what that looked like for me on that rainy, cloudy, birthday-blues Tuesday:

Yes, it’s been a rocky start to my birthday month. AND I am so thankful for the flowers outside my office window enduring the cold, for the sound of the furnace warming my bones, for the serenity of a beautiful home filled with the presence of God.

Yes, doubts and fears have clouded my mind. AND I am grateful that in every season of doubt, insecurity, and indecision, God has been faithful and counseled me with wisdom.

The circumstances hadn’t changed by the time I wrote those words. But something in me had.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)

That transformation doesn’t always arrive as a dramatic breakthrough. Sometimes it arrives as a quiet, deliberate choice to find one thing — just one — to be grateful for. And then another. And then another.

Eventually, I rise. Not because the rain stopped. But because gratitude kept renewing my mind until I could see clearly again.

Want to Grow in Gratitude Together?

If you want to begin building gratitude as a daily practice — not as a performance, but as a genuine tool for emotional and spiritual wholeness — I created something just for you.

The 7-Day Guided Gratitude Journal is a free resource that walks you through a simple, powerful gratitude practice one day at a time. It’s gentle. It’s real. And it works.

👉Download your free 7-Day Gratitude Guide here

What is one thing — just one — you could be genuinely grateful for today, even in the middle of a hard season?