A Love Letter:
to the emotions I used to hide
to the emotions I used to hide
I’ve been experiencing this feeling that I describe as grief, though it is not grief, I don’t have a better emotion to describe it as. So I feel this non-grief that I call grief, with a heaviness in my chest. It feels like a wave, not crashing into me, but a tide that is tugging at something. A tide slowly ripping the sand away, leaving me eroded over time.
I haven’t been able to find a cause for this. I haven’t even found a pattern of when this feeling wells up inside. It seems fully random. And I wonder if it may just be a by-product of me tapping into the wide breadth of the emotional scale. That maybe this is an emotion I had never allowed myself to feel until on this journey of emotional discovery.
I’ve been on this discovery, or activation, for over a year now. I realized that I had become too good at shutting off the emotional scale in my body; that I could shut down and almost not feel. It was dissociative and numbing. I thought to allow myself to move emotions through my body, to truly be present in my emotional state, was a weakness that I needed to stamp out.
We are shown this from the beginning
We are toddlers, crying in a restaurant and our caretakers are shushing us, telling us we can’t cry in public. We’re told we are our parents’ “happy child,” that “big kids don’t cry.” We get taught to feel ashamed for experiencing anger; that anger is a sign of low intelligence. Every emotion becomes a reflection of our character rather than a necessary bodily response to our environments.
I remember having a conversation in English class one day. We were reading the Great Gatsby. Daisy had just made the comment about how she would rather be beautiful and ignorant. In the class, we began discussing whether or not ignorance truly was bliss. Someone mentioned that they heard that life either turns you soft and weak or makes you bitter and cold. And I remember turning to them and saying, “I don’t care how harsh life gets, I refuse to turn away and be cold.”
During my high-horse declaration, I really believed that life should be completely experienced. I believed that every emotion was important and should be felt fully. I didn’t want to believe that life was just meant to kick you down. I wanted to be present for every event in my life, no matter how good or bad, because it meant I was living.
And somewhere along the way, the bad events started outweighing the good and I started to lose my grip on my ferocious presentness. At one point, I just wanted to hide. I wanted to give up and say, “Daisy was right. I wish I was ignorant.”
I recently rediscovered that emotional scale again
When I found the key, the doors burst wide open and I felt everything I had been storing away. It rushed over me in such a storm that I was bedridden for days just from weeping. I cried over everything I had experienced in the last 8 years. I cried for that young girl that I felt I left behind. I cried to forgive myself for abandoning my experience. No matter how badly I wanted to hide, my experiences were mine, my soul was mine and I was worthy of feeling everything to the fullest, without fear. I was living.
This may sound dramatic, and it is. I realized how important this discovery was when I was at a TedTalk event in Chicago.
One of the speakers, an extreme skier, spoke on fear. She spoke about how we are not meant to ignore fear; people who do extreme sports are not fearless, but rather view fear as their friend. She continued by offering that fear, like most emotions, are ones that we are taught to shut down. We are taught to experience them as they come is weak.
Later, in a workshop, she was the first asked to share an experience. She stood up, spoke about the hardships she was facing and began to cry. She didn’t try to shut down. She didn’t apologize for crying in public. She was just fully in her present emotion with such grace and authenticity that the entire energy shifted in the room. After that, each person stood and spoke with such truth and emotion; she had inspired everyone in that workshop to show up; to be fully seen.
I was last to speak and all the emotions of everyone before me, welled up and I was left feeling completely bare. Everything in me wanted to curl up and hide, speaking on an experience that I knew I could muster through to close out the workshop. But, that would have been a disservice to the work I had done up until now.
I stood up and spoke about my trauma over the years. I spoke about my rape, my mother’s illness, my fears of missing out on life while I healed. I allowed myself to be fully seen, crying, snot and all, without shame for my past or guilt for speaking on such sensitive matters.
It was one of those moments that you can see the turning point in your life as it’s occurring. I spoke slowly and deliberately to make sure that I was truly present in that moment.
I had been someone that leaned on logic to push through the uncomfortable moments of life. When I shut myself off, I noticed I would try to intellectualize my experiences, so that it seemed as though I was already healed. I spoke in fragments and in facts, my friend of 20 years not even knowing the full experience of trauma until recently. I kept my emotions locked away and hidden so I didn’t disrupt anyone or situations. I told myself my emotions and desires were too much because I was not enough. That I was not worth the ripples it would cause.
So that moment, standing in a room with people I didn’t know, albeit one who had never seen me cry before, tearing my heart out and putting in on the table, was an important one. The TedTalk speaker came up to me after, her arm on my shoulder, and told me how proud she was for me to stand in a truth that was not comfortable for others. She told me that to speak with such honesty was something she wished she learned earlier.
Don’t let your emotions hide
And that’s why I’m feeling a grief that I am not sure the reason. As someone who is so used to hiding behind reason, it’s taken me a long time to understand emotions don’t necessarily need one. And they aren’t a singular experience. You can feel multitudes. Maybe I’m feeling joy for opening myself up to stepping into my authenticity, but grief for saying goodbye to my old identity. Or maybe I’m not. And trying to put a definition on that emotion does nothing for me. To just feel and move through emotions as they come is liberating.
Daisy might have been right and ignorance may be bliss, but it isn’t a life worth living. Even when feeling emotions that seem to rip my heart out, a part of my soul is smiling, knowing I kept my promise to that little girl, who never wanted to shy away from the world.
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