You Can Be Two Things at Once and Why Holding Opposites is Part of Being Human
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Anika Kumar Vashishth is a Positive Psychology Practitioner and founder of I Am Enough | Flourish, a community supporting people to cultivate self-awareness, wellbeing, and flourishing. With a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Melbourne, she brings evidence-based psychology into everyday life.
Ever since I was a child, I remember being asked the familiar question, "Is the glass half full or half empty?" It always seemed that there had to be a right answer. Half full meant optimism. Half empty meant noticing what was missing. But somewhere along the way, I started answering differently.
What if it is both?
The glass is half full. It is half empty. Both are true.
I have been thinking about this beyond the glass. About how often we do the same thing with ourselves. We want our experiences to fit into one category, one feeling, one version of who we are. We are either doing well or struggling. We are either grateful or wanting more. We are either confident or afraid. But life rarely feels that neat.
We can be two things at once. We can even be many things at once.
Psychology has given us interesting ways of thinking about this. Our sense of self isn't necessarily one fixed, unchanging entity. Different aspects of who we are can become more visible depending on our roles, relationships and circumstances. The person who feels confident at work may feel uncertain in a relationship. The person who is usually independent may deeply need connection. The person who has handled difficult things before may still have days when something feels difficult to carry.
None of these experiences necessarily makes the other untrue. They can belong to the same person. This is where emotions become interesting.
We often treat emotions as though one should replace another. If I am afraid, I should become confident. If I am disappointed, I should remind myself to be grateful. If I am hurting, I should find the lesson. Sometimes that helps. But sometimes, in our hurry to feel differently, we may not give ourselves enough space to notice what we are actually experiencing.
What if I can be grateful and disappointed? Hopeful and worried? Loving and angry? Afraid and courageous? The presence of one emotion does not necessarily cancel another. Emotional experience is more complex than the categories we often give it.
This is where the idea of coexistence becomes useful. Not because every feeling needs to be acted upon. Not because every contradiction needs to be resolved. Simply because two experiences can exist at the same time.
There is an important difference between making room for a feeling and surrendering to it. If I feel afraid, I can acknowledge the fear without allowing it to make every decision for me. If I feel angry, I can understand the anger without making anger my behaviour. If I feel uncertain, I can sit amid uncertainty and still choose a direction.
Making room is not giving something control. It is allowing ourselves enough space to understand what is there before deciding what to do with it. That is also why acceptance needs to be understood carefully.
Acceptance does not necessarily mean approval. It does not mean giving up. It does not mean deciding that something difficult should remain unchanged. Sometimes acceptance means recognising: This is what I am experiencing right now. From there, we can decide what needs to change.
That distinction matters because coexistence is not about becoming passive. It may actually give us more room to act with intention. This is particularly relevant to the way we think about wellbeing.
Positive psychology has explored what helps people flourish, positive emotions, relationships, strengths, meaning and other resources that support human functioning. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory, for example, suggests that positive emotions can broaden our momentary patterns of thought and action and build psychological resources over time.
But what is most interesting here is not choosing positive emotions over difficult ones. It is recognising that something positive can exist alongside something difficult. We can experience stress and still have instances of connection. We can experience disappointment and still experience gratitude. We can be going through uncertainty and still have hope.
The difficult experience does not have to disappear before something nourishing can exist beside it. For me, this is where psychology meets something more personal.
There is an Indian Sanskrit word that has stayed with me: Pūrṇa, whole, complete, full. I do not understand wholeness as perfection. Being whole means not being consistently confident, calm, grateful or resilient. Wholeness is simply the recognition that the difficult parts of our experience do not make us incomplete.
One part of me can be tired, and another can be hopeful. A part that wants change and another that is grateful for what already exists. A part that is afraid and another that knows I can keep moving. Perhaps none of these parts has to win. They can all offer information. They can all belong.
This is also why I find the idea of multiple selves, or different aspects of the self, so interesting. We are not necessarily the same version of ourselves in every situation. We change with context. We grow. We discover parts of ourselves that were less visible before. Sometimes, a difficult period can make us question who we are simply because the version of ourselves that previously felt familiar no longer feels quite the same.
Nature as an inspiration to hold opposites together
Nature seems to understand this without needing to explain it. A tree does not remain the same throughout the year. There are seasons of growth, fullness, shedding and stillness. We do not look at a tree in winter and decide that it has stopped being a tree. We understand that it is changing.
Human beings are, of course, far more complicated. We carry memories, expectations and stories about who we think we should be. But there is still something to learn from the simplicity of a changing season.
A difficult season does not erase the seasons that came before it. Being uncertain today does not mean we have lost our capacity for confidence. Feeling tired does not erase our strength. Wanting something different does not make us ungrateful for what we have. We can change without rejecting who we were.
We may not have to turn every difficult experience into a lesson immediately. Sometimes it may simply be something we are experiencing. Something we can notice. Something we can understand. Something we can carry while we decide what comes next.
That could be the real lesson hidden in the half-full, half-empty glass. Not that we should choose optimism. Not that we should focus on what is missing. But that sometimes both ways of seeing can be true.
Perhaps the same is true of us. We can be proud of how far we have come and still wish we were somewhere else. We can love our lives and still want them to change. We can be grateful and still have unmet needs. We can be afraid and still be brave. We can be growing and still find growth difficult.
The question may not always be: Which one is true? Perhaps sometimes the better question is, "What else is true at the same time?"
We may not always have to choose. Both can belong. Perhaps being whole is not about becoming one consistent version of ourselves. It may be about making enough room for all that is true.
Read more from Anika Kumar Vashishth
Anika Kumar Vashishth, Positive Psychology Practitioner
Anika Kumar Vashishth is a Positive Psychology Practitioner whose work explores mental wellbeing beyond the absence of distress, towards flourishing. Grounded in positive psychology and neuroscience, she is interested in what enables individuals and communities not merely to function, but to live with greater meaning, connection, and wellbeing. She is the founder of I Am Enough | Flourish, a community that brings evidence-based approaches to wellbeing into everyday life. Her work is centred on making the science of flourishing accessible, relevant, and applicable to how we live, learn, and connect.
