I’ve noticed as I grow older that many Americans – especially those online – seem to believe that we must be happy all the time, people and dogs will never die, and that all the news we absorb must be good and that even people with good and healthy reasons to worry are somehow weak or neurotic or unhealthy.

There’s a lot of bad news going on around our country and we want to be happy, not sad or worried. But life has other ideas for us.

I am finding in my life that joy and happiness can always be found and seen if we are open to them.

Worry has a right to live too. It is, like breathing, and death, a part of life. In a sense, it isn’t craziness, it’s the very essence of sanity.

Life and marriage and an independent, self-driven creative life have taught me that I should not dismiss the legitimate and understandable worries of people, especially my wife.

There are often good reasons for some worrying, worrying can promote safety and common sense as well as undermine it.

I have never written one thing I didn’t worry about sending off or posting. I’m only now realizing how healthy that was and is.

It makes no sense to me to be shocked and devastated when a friend dies, or a dog dies. Or when I create something that fails and don’t worry about it.

It isn’t that I can’t feel empathy, I feel an awful lot of it.

But social media – Facebook, Twitter especially – are not engines of truth, and they rarely punish or challenge lies. I think a major function of Facebook has become a vehicle for people to make themselves and their lives look better and happier than they are.

In doing so, they reject and deny life.

Social media is a palace of lies and distortions. That isn’t healthy either.

I know too many people whose portrayal of themselves online bears little resemblance to their lives, which are, like most lives, full of struggle as well as joy.

This lesson was driven home to me in a personal way this morning when I found myself apologizing to my wife for worrying that she might not sell a new and original piece of art she spent many hours creating.

The apology was a sudden revelation. She had every right to be worried, as do I whenever I write something different on my blog. When I listened to my own voice, it sounded false and hollow.

Maria and I are creatives, we don’t get regular paychecks. We sing for our supper, just like dancing elephants used to do in the circus.

Maria made a gorgeous pillow this morning and she is planning to make two more. She called me up to say she was worried about selling these pillows. She used original fabric prints she made with her friend Emily, something that she has never used before. What if people didn’t like it?

Most people in marriages are full of cliches we use automatically when certain situations come up. We get so used to one another we can speak without really thinking.

Maria is often concerned when she makes something that is new and different. She wonders if people will buy it.

This is almost a joke with us, as I tend to dismiss this worry and kid her about being a worrier. She comes to me for comfort and support, and without thinking, I offer reflexive bullshit and cliches and blowing her off.

That is not helpful.

It hit me like a lightning bolt as we were having this conversation on the car phone. Wait a minute, I said out loud after joking about her worry, “that is a dumb thing and a patronizing thing to say to you, I’m sorry:”

She was surprised, I’ve always sort of laughed her worry about selling her work, mostly because she almost always sells it. And because it’s great.

I thought my role was to laugh at those fears so she wouldn’t take them seriously. But that isn’t my role. It’s to accept who she is and ask the same for me.

I can’t recall a time when she didn’t sell something she made, although I know it happens.

She asked me why I was sorry.  She wanted to hear more.

“Well, for one thing, I worry all the time about whether people will read my work or support my blog. Just yesterday I wrote a 4,000-word piece about farming and cows, and the first thing I said to you was, ‘well, nobody is going to read that piece, it’s too long and too sad.”

I reminded Maria that she blew me off when I said that and joked that I always say that about new and different things that I write, and I’m always wrong.

That piece got more than 200 shares on Facebook and inspired scores of messages, all of them kind and thoughtful.

So we were doing the same thing to each other. Rather than speaking to the understandable anxiety that comes from the lives we chose and love, we were laughing at one another and dismissing legitimate concerns.

“I just realized talking to you,” I said, ” that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being worried about something that is new and different and took you many hours to make. I’m worried every day about what I write on my blog. That’s why we do good work in part, I think because we don’t take our customers or readers for granted. Of course, you worried about the pillow, you used new print fabric, which you hadn’t done before. It’s perfectly healthy and reasonable to be a little concerned about whether it will sell.”

Why I wondered, it is considered healthy to deny one’s feelings and to avoid considering the dangers we really face? We love our loves and have no complaints, but we don’t have months or years to build up our finances.

We have a week or to pay our bills.

This is the story of the creative life. It is a good life and I wouldn’t change it for anything, but it brings worries as well. Lots of people don’t have jobs that pay their bills or creative work to do.

Do they not have a right to worry? Are people telling them to laugh it off?

Maria thanked me for this conversation, she said it was very helpful for her to hear. I was giving her permission to be herself, not someone who should be someone else.

Maria and I both live the lives of creatives. We have only as much money as we have in the bank right now.

If I don’t get donations and she doesn’t sell her work, we won’t have any money, we couldn’t pay our bills and that is something we should worry about so that we make sure we earn what we need.

We both acknowledge to one another that if we had a ton of money, we probably would get all screwed up in the head and not do much good work at all.

Maria and I don’t work just for money, we work out of love for what we do. But we don’t get regular paychecks, that is the choice we made.

There is nothing neurotic about that, or unhealthy. On the contrary, it is quite healthy, as any creative would testify.

In the future, when Maria tells me she is worried about selling a new kind of piece, I won’t laugh it off or turn it into a patronizing joke.

Making work is a serious business for creatives like her and if she doesn’t worry about selling her things a bit she will have to give up her art.

That would be a much worse loss for her than not selling a pillow.

We both talked about this all during lunch, and Maria thanked me for bringing this up, she said she felt better right away, hearing that she wasn’t crazy, it was natural for her to worry sometimes.

It was a good lesson for me too. Five minutes after we hung, the phone rang again. It was Maria.

“I just sold the pillow,” she said.