To Feel or Not to Feel

It’s a funny thing, how we learn to adapt and deal with the world around us. It’s true that this is an importation skill of survival and can often serve us well. But sometimes the ways we learn to cope are as unhealthy as the thing we are trying to protect ourselves from.

At least that has been a discovery I made about myself recently. Last week I had an interview for a job (I did not get it, but that is another blog post for another day). It was an event leading up to the interview that made me take a hard look at how I have been dealing with my life right now, and quite frankly it rattled me.

I was having dinner with my uncle the night before I was scheduled to go try to sell myself in that awkward way we do to get a piece of that economic pie. It was dinner during this the calm and pleasant dinner conversation that I just broke down. I cried in the middle of a restaurant in West Hollywood. I was mortified.

The thing is I couldn’t really pin point exactly what the catalyst was. It was like a damn had broke and this flood of emotion just came over me and there was no way to stop it.

I realized that it was not just nerves about the impending interview (although that definitely was a part of it) but actually it was a cocktail of emotions I have been suppressing for months. Between stressing about my post graduate life, and a significant chapter of poor health I had dealt with it was overwhelming on-slot of crud. But instead of dealing with it as it came I swallowed it down.

So why did I do this? Well I think it is because I have spent so much of my life in heightened states of stress and anxiety. And I have done lots of work to not let those intense destructive emotions overwhelm my life. But I think somewhere along the way I overcorrected. I have got to a place in my life were I just try not to feel at all. I think subconsciously I have convinced myself that if I feel any sort of negative or uncomfortable emotion than I am backsliding.

The thing is though, that I am going through a stressful transition in my life. And it is ok to honor those emotions that I will inevitably feel in this chapter. As my uncle so wisely put it “how quaint you’re being human”. I could not help but laugh the truth is it is okay to feel, it is human and as long as it does not stop my forward motion then it is a vital reminder of existence.