No emotion is your permanent reality
Growing up, I never understood my emotions. Some people would just get so annoyed if they saw me cry or others would ask me “why are you crying” with that “please stop crying” look on their face. The thing was that I was always on the extremes with my emotions. Either I was completely ignoring them and pushing them away like they didn’t exist, or I was falling apart at the seam because I let them take too much control over my everyday life.
How can we learn to understand our emotions, face them, and not let them take over all at once? Whenever I have a daughter or son, I hope that I can share with them that: No emotion is your permanent reality. We can feel one way one day, and then another tomorrow. But our emotions do not define who we are as people, friends, parents, siblings, anything else you can think of.
Marriage really brought to light my immense struggle with emotions. Not in a bad way, but in a beautiful, messy way. My husband is the complete opposite of me. He doesn’t tune into his emotions as much as I do. I struggled with that a lot because if I couldn’t even explain that I was feeling sad or upset, and he doesn’t even think about those feelings and emotions as much as I do, how in the world were we going to communicate? But the beauty of it, was that we learned to try and find the middle ground with emotions and feelings. I don’t think we are meant to ignore our feelings. I think we were made to care for others, feel their pain, and empathize with others. But I also don’t think we were meant to carry all of the feelings and emotions of everyone around us, 100% of the time.
If I could tell my younger self anything I would say: its okay to feel how you feel, just don’t stay there. Its okay to feel sad, but don’t stay there. It’s okay to feel angry, just don’t stay there. It’s okay to feel disappointed, just don’t stay there. It’s even okay to feel so happy, but don’t stay there. Why? Because there is a balance, life is not always this great high. There are moments that just suck. You can appreciate happy moments, because you survived those hard, sad ones.
