I think one of my biggest lessons coming from everything so far is just allowing myself the space to feel things. For so many years I was living with this internal belief that 1. I wasn’t supposed to feel and 2. my feelings didn’t matter.
I’ve mentioned before that I had been bullied in 7th grade, and during that whole ordeal I ended up flipping the switch on my emotions because crying in front of people meant that I got harassed even more. It was for survival, for safety, it was the best I could do at the time.
What came up this week was an even earlier memory. I was in kindergarten and we were at recess. I kept running over to my teacher to tell her when someone was being mean or made fun of me and she started calling me a tattletale and telling me that if someone wasn’t being physically hurt then I didn’t need to tell her about it. What I realized is that in that moment I internalized the idea that if my feelings were hurt it didn’t matter. Or even simpler, my feelings didn’t matter.
So, as the years went on and people would hurt me emotionally, and I didn’t tell anyone because I had this belief that it didn’t matter.
Can we just take a moment? I mean whoa.
Since I was four years old, I haven’t been giving myself the validation of my feelings. I haven’t been allowing myself to feel hurt because I had been taught that hurt feelings didn’t matter. I quite literally haven’t been giving myself the space to feel hurt for the last 29 years of my life.
As I am trying to navigate these changes, I feel like an infant. I don’t know how to feel my emotions, and I don’t know how to hold space for them either because I have been living a life of denying them.
What I’ve been witnessing is that all this feeling has brought back a lot of additions I thought I had taken care of: emotional eating and using social media as a distraction, to be specific. So, learning how to keep space for these emotions to exist is huge, because I don’t want to fall back into old addictive patterns. I don’t want to continue to try to numb myself from the pain and joy of life. I tried living that way… all it got me was depressed and suicidal.
I imagine this is a lot of people’s stories. I imagine that we all have some work to do on allowing ourselves to feel and hold space for those feelings without trying to fix them. It’s okay to feel hurt, sad, lonely, and unloved, just like it’s okay to feel loved, happy, joyful, and content.
We are alive and we are human, we live in the realm of these intense emotions because that’s just where we are right now. We were born to fully experience the breadth and depth of this life. As much as I want to live as Pollyanna, I know that one day my dad will die and that will make me very sad. The house I live in could burn down. I could end up with cancer. And all of that is okay. It’s just beautiful experience.
If you can, take a moment today and sit and breathe, and try to be a space for what you are feeling. Don’t try to figure out how to fix it or find out where it came from, just breathe and hold it. Ultimately, that’s all every emotion in our bodies wants – to be seen, felt, and experienced, not shoved into the corner in hopes that it will go away.
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