We live in a society terrified of feelings.
Sure, we post about them on Instagram (hi @Bella Hadid), tout about our therapists on Twitter, and trauma dump on second dates.
But something I’ve been reckoning with is in what ways all of this talking (read: posting, writing, texting) is putting distance between ourselves and our bodies.
A veteran oversharer, my Instagram close friends story and group chats are spared no detail of my life. I always assumed I was incredibly in touch with my emotions: I was talking about them all day, copy and pasting voice memos about my breakup and calling anyone who would listen to me vent about how frustrated I was in my relationship. How could I not be feeling when I was talking, writing, posting like, literally all the time?
It wasn’t until my body was overcome with nausea, my appetite lost, my shoulders in permanent tension, that I came to ask myself if all of this chatter was doing much for the emotional release I so desperately needed (okay scratch that, I didn’t ask myself — my therapist forced me to answer). Because the truth is, in telling stories (about my relationship, about my feelings), I was effectively separating myself from my emotions. And there’s value in that separation, in knowing that your emotions don’t define you. But I used it as a tactic of avoidance. I found myself in some combination of performance and intellectualization, an observer of my own experiences rather than a participant in them. I could tell the story of my break-turned-breakup (because they always do) in 7 minutes flat (though if you have more time than that, I’ll sure as hell use it). I know where the beginning, middle, and end is, which parts land as jokes, what to exaggerate and what to skip through. And I’m still telling that story.
But when I finally slowed down enough that I wasn’t storytelling, but instead feeling— well that’s when things got significantly uncomfortable. Because in fact, I am terrified of my emotions. That’s not an overstatement (my therapist assured me). I’m so afraid to be alone with my thoughts and the feelings they lead to that I would rather fill my days and nights jumping from distraction to distraction, scheduling sleepovers and constantly being on FaceTime, running in the opposite direction from even a moment of time alone. I didn’t don’t want to face whatever is pent up inside of me, but instead, my body forced me to. Repressed emotions show up for me in these psychosomatic symptoms — in the nausea after 3 bites of a taco, dizziness reading a text message, the chills that come over me or the anxiety waking me up at 5 AM. They feel like choking, or bricks laying atop my chest, a pressure stretching from my heart and up through my throat. When you run from your emotions long enough, they’ll show up in ways you can’t ignore.
Feeling something is incredibly scary, and as a culture, I believe we’ve prioritized productivity and busyness to an extent that leaves no room for emotional processing. It can feel like an inconvenience to cry for 20, 30, 60 minutes, because gosh, feelings are just so all-consuming it threatens to throw your whole day off. And more often than not, if your day is scheduled down to the hour— it does. We’ve built a pace of life where there is, at least for me, no space for emotion. It feels like a waste of my time to cry, to scream, to feel — because shouldn’t I be doing something more “productive” with my time? I have to tell myself repeatedly that feeling something (anger, grief, sadness, disappointment) is enough. Because most of the time, I’m asking myself: What can I do about this feeling; How can I get rid of it; When will it end. The lack of control our emotions afford us can be, and is for me, agonizingly uncomfortable.
My mom always taught me that emotions come in waves. They build with what seems like an exponential amount of force, but then, inevitably and without fail, they break. They crash. They end. People will tell us to “ride the wave,” and I’ve always thought it easier said than done. I think that’s because it’s much easier to stand back up after a wave crashes when you’re standing still, than it is to get up if you’re always running. I’m exhausted from running, and my body knows it too. It seems like a good of time as any to try standing still.