Here is what happened: On a very ordinary day that would prove not to be ordinary at all, I found small lumps. Aug 15th. I shook it off. Around that time, I started my first full time job. I was alone in a tiny East Village sublet, trying to form the routines that would become the bedrock of my life as an adult.

Those routines never settled in. The stress accumulated like dust: slowly, then all at once, it was there. Those lumps were not going away. The doctors weren’t sure. My life changed from then onwards. There’s the life you planned and there’s the life that’s unfolding before your eyes.

My head spun. I decided to move back home with my parents. I felt scared, overwhelmed, and ashamed. I shut myself out. I left New York without saying bye and didn’t tell anyone why. Those days, I developed two responses. I would wake up, clock in remotely to work, and spend the rest either 1) panicked, googling symptoms until I could no longer look at the images anymore 2) immobilized in bed, watching vlogs to distract myself from my own life.

Spending more time at home, I found out my family was on the verge of breaking apart. I never had a hunch, but I was just too blind to see it. Too ignorant to see them as human too.

I was privileged to have lived a life where I hadn’t really gone through much adversity at all. From my russian literature class: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. I felt grateful I belonged to the former, but almost embarrassed knowing friends who had gone through unimaginable hardships and carried those weights. Still, it left me very unprepared to deal with the regular disasters of life.

I had felt the most stressed I had ever felt before. I

It only took 2 decades for me to realize that bad news is inevitable. The only difference is in reacting differently. I have two ways of coping: 1 is shutting down and doing anything I can to feel good about myself (usually watching a video). 2 is feeling completely overwhelmed and just overall freaking out in my head. Obviously, neither are productive, so how do I just take in the bad news and move in the proper direction?

Long story short, the lumps turned out to be benign. It was a misdiagnosis.

I had the roughest year recently. In the fall, I discovered several lumps that shouldn’t have been there. Before my diagnosis could come back, I drowned in fear, anger, distrust. Then, my family shattered in ways I could never have foreseen. At this point, bad news was anticipated each month: mass layoffs at my first job. I feel very, very lucky that each of these came out on the better half of good. And I feel luckier I came out a stronger man afterwards.

My diagnosis came back negative, it was a rare curable infection. I held my family together — we are closer than before now. Even though I felt burnt out with each issue, I survived the layoffs and several more cuts afterwards.

Believe me, I was absolutely not stone-faced during this. I moved from NYC back home. I ran a lot — it made the pain feel less painful. On the times I wasn’t working, I spent most of it in bed trying to distract myself. I didn’t see too many people. I was practically paralyzed by emotions or completely overwhelmed.

Our lived experiences exist on a scale defined by our past. When my parents took me to a local amusement park as a kid, I was overjoyed. That was the best amusement park I had ever been to. We went every year and the entire family loved it. When I went to a bigger, more extreme amusement park, I felt the same overjoyed feeling — it was the new best amusement park I had been to. But the local one never felt the same anymore. I basically hit a new “extreme” for how fun something could be.

When something really bad happens to us, we feel like the world is caving in on us. It’s our new maxima for how bad something is. And you don’t know how to react, so you react in similarly extreme ways.

The worst thing you want to hear right now is that it’s all in your head, but it really is. Zoom out a bit, what would someone else (I like to imagine a counsel of my role models) do in this situation?

Assess how bad the catastrophe really is in the grand scheme of your goals. It’s very possible it’s hitting the upper register and you’re freaking out, but think about the other worst time. You are going to feel like things are impossible, but there are things in your control. Trust that you’ll get through it slightly easier than last time.

Acceptance over bad news doesn’t happen immediately. And this won’t get easier. But slowly we callous our mind. And bad things get easier to accept.