I want to close out the melancholy month that October has unintentionally turned out to be here at Essays No Onse Asked For on a teensy bit of a higher note: reflecting on why it is so good to (occasionally) feel so bad.
As I’ve mentioned countless times in therapy, this newsletter, and social media posts regarding this newsletter, I spent most of my childhood and adolescence trying to convince my peers and, most importantly, myself that I didn’t have feelings. The logic was simple: if you don’t have feelings, they can’t get hurt. After a while, I got so good at pretending that nothing phased me that things really did stop phasing me. A friend and I compared stress levels one day when we were too young to really understand what the word meant. As she recounted every last worry she had in life, my perceived stress level rang in at zero and I assumed that meant I had won.
Late last year, in one of my first visits, my therapist asked me if I felt my feelings in my body and the only way I could think to reply was to ask her what she meant. It was the first time I had been made aware that emotions were meant to exist not just in our minds, but throughout the physical body. Until that point, I thought that feeling emotions outside of my head was a problem, a sign that things had gotten out of hand — the chest tightness that shows up with anxiety attacks, the quaking that so often accompanies intense rage. Rather than the origin, I saw my physical body as the overflow point for sentiments that had gotten too big to stay inside my head where I assumed they belonged.
Feelings, my therapist explained, are called such because they are meant to be felt — the brain is a great thing for thinking, but the rest of the body is designed specifically for feeling. Something so obvious when said out loud had previously remained just beyond the realm of my awareness. My problem wasn’t, as it turned out, that I felt too much or too strongly as I had convinced myself for most of my life, but that I didn’t allow myself to feel enough. I had placed the responsibility of feeling my emotions on the same organ I depended on to sort through them, intellectualizing them instead of experiencing them fully.
We don’t depend on the post office to intuit when we might need an invitation to a wedding or a baby shower, to create and provide the invitation; all we ask of the post office is to sort and deliver the invitation that someone else, a dear friend, perhaps, has put in the mail and addressed to us. I’m not a professional and I’m not even very good yet at actually feeling my feelings, but I’m pretty sure the body is the same way. The brain is intended only to make sense of the signals it receives from the rest of the body, to translate shakes and butterflies and flushing of the cheeks and sweating of the palms. Eventually, the mind learns to associate a tight chest with anxiety, a lump in the throat with sadness, a million physical nuances with a million indescribable feelings.
Eventually, one might start to think, as I did, that if it is possible to stop the body from feeling what the mind recognizes as unpleasant, we won’t have to feel bad ever again. And so we disconnect our minds from our bodies, pushing two things that technically share a vessel as far from one another as they can be within the bounds of their shared confines. And for a while, it works. By separating the mind from the body, we separate feelings from thoughts, and unpleasant thoughts can be pushed away much more readily than a nagging physical discomfort.
My default state throughout childhood can most easily be described as angry. Anger, a secondary emotion that tends to arise when we refuse to address the primary emotion(s) beneath it, felt like a shield that protected the big feelings in my tiny body. Rather than let my friends know in real time that they had hurt me by hanging out without me or making a snide comment about the cut of socks I was wearing (I am only now, at twenty-six years old, beginning to overcome the aversion to crew socks I’ve had since one unassuming day in the third grade), I brushed off these tiny offenses. Perpetually afraid of overreacting, I under-reacted to most of the tiny things that bothered me. In dismissing my emotional response to tiny injustices, I unwittingly let them build upon one another until eventually, one misstep would set me off and I would explode, the aftermath of which would only feed my fear of overreacting, thus beginning the cycle again.
When we don’t allow ourselves to experience the full scope of our emotions, we don’t get to pick and choose which ones we feel and which ones we don’t. In trying to dampen the bad, I not only fed the anger I didn’t want to have, but I also inadvertently stifled the good. I allowed life milestones to pass without much fanfare, unable to give my excitement a home. In working so hard to train myself to let disappointment, fear, and sadness roll off my back like water from a duck’s, I failed to realize that emotions are all made of the same things; if one rolls off, they all will. We can’t simply choose to stop feeling what we don’t want, we can only choose to feel or not to feel — all or nothing — should we find ourselves lucky enough to be afforded any choice in the matter at all.
It took me nearly twenty years to begin to recognize that in trying to immunize myself against pain, I had shortened the whole of my emotional spectrum. It took a few more years to decide that whatever joy might lay beyond my current emotional reach might be worth opening the door to deeper discomfort. I couldn’t feel better unless I allowed myself to risk feeling worse.
The dip I felt earlier this month means that my mood had risen high enough for it to sink in the first place, and I had become attentive enough to notice the difference. With the help of therapy, this newsletter, and the process of elimination, I was able to conclude that my tiredness at the beginning of the month lay not within my physical body, or within my mental body, but within a third body whose existence I had never before considered: my emotional body. Only by realizing that, by identifying the feelings in my body and pinpointing the source, could I begin to make my way back to the version of myself I wanted to be — not denying the feelings as they were, but sitting with them, and eventually working all the way through them. The more fully we allow ourselves to experience our lows, the more completely we can get lost in our highs when they come. And only by recognizing that we are feeling less than stellar can we begin to come back to neutral ground.
I want to do a poll! October has been a little different than most months, with each issue building upon the last. Do you like when each post is united by a common theme, or do you prefer standalone essays? Vote like your life depends on it!
medium maple chai with oat milk please
the two girls in the corner
are conspiring against me I know it
my grandma would tell me their
constant glances and hardly-hushed whispers
are because they’re just jealous
that they aren’t as beautiful as I am
who needs family or friends
when you can have fans
tricks and/or treats
I want to write a halloween poem but
can’t think of anything that scares me
except the clichés of course
spiders, the dark, the constant onward march of time,
taxes
today I’m crying about what tomorrow
will be nothing but a memory
hang me in the smithsonian
michelangelo could look at a stone
and see a figure trapped inside
begging to be revealed
I can’t even look in the mirror
and understand what lurks
beneath the surface
my journey to myself seems to be less
like chiseling away at what isn’t me
and more like slapping together wet clumps
of anything that could be
throwing noodles at the wall
seeing what sticks
and eating the rest
Reminder to check out the amazing gift sets I helped curate for The Workbench if you haven’t already! Otherwise, that’s all I have for you this week. How has October been for you? What were you like as a child? What is your biggest fear? I’m dying to know.
ps find me elsewhere on the internet @serenakuj if you’re so inclined
my biggest fear is a snake being in the toilet and biting my bum, or!!!!! a general fear of failure and/or not being good enough :’)
october has been a good month id say though lol
Love this one and love how (I hope!) you’re feeling better. 🥰 Oh - and the turtleneck, high ponytail and that fantastic coat should be your new uniform. 😍