Since I was eight years old I remember feeling like I had too many emotions and was constantly overwhelmed by them. Now, I’m 22 and the catchphrase of my life is “It’s fine I always cry!!” with tears in my eyes at literally any given second. However, what I’ve been told from my mom since I was little, to what my counselors tell me now, has always been the same, being able to feel so deeply and have intense emotions about “everything” is such a gift.
The realities of our world, especially today, can be extremely numbing. When I think about feeling numb, I think about the days I wake up without feeling happy, sad, angry, agitated, excited. I just wake up. It feels frustrating and discouraging because a lot of the time, I don’t know why I feel that way. When I have low emotion days, I often feel withdrawn and isolated from everyone, even my family and friends. This in turn makes me feel more anxious and withdrawn and you get what I mean, it sucks! I’m lucky that the days I spend feeling this way are not the norm, but they are a sharp contrast to other days where I feel charged with emotion.
What I have been trying to do, is shift how I think about being emotional. You have to give yourself the space to feel these things. You cannot dismiss your feelings anymore. It is in that space of feeling that we become educated, practice empathy, learn, grow and progress as people. Denying yourself of that feeling is denying yourself of growth and of the possibility to know yourself more truly. So, what does making the space to feel look like?
It’s important to listen to how you feel to tell you what you need, but, this can be overwhelming and discouraging at first. So here are some ways to start: allow yourself to be sad, angry, however you feel for 10 minutes. Know that when that 10 minutes is over you will get back up and continue with your day because that is what you have to do, but in that 10 minutes, you give yourself time to feel your feelings, listen to them, validate them. Another way to create space for your emotions is to journal. I have found journaling to be incredibly helpful for processing my emotions. When you write, don’t censor or stop yourself, just write what you think, how you feel. Then, In the future you are able to refer to your journal to remember your exact feelings if you decide to address them with a counselor, family member or friend and, if you start to feel those emotions again, you can make connections about the situations that made you feel that way, and begin to notice patterns, etc.
Lastly, make space for your feelings by sharing them with someone. When you feel emotion so intensely, it can be hard to express them to another person and often it may feel like it won’t make a difference anyway and it is easier to just not say anything. It takes courage to share how you are feeling with someone else, but when you do, you validate your emotions and take away the burden of carrying them all alone. Often, emotions feel way bigger when we feel like they have to be kept inside, once we talk to someone else about them, we can see them for what they actually are, just feelings!
Most importantly, work to not judge yourself for being emotional. We are so critical of ourselves, so judging ourselves for this only seems natural. But remember, feelings are just feelings. They are real and are meant to help us learn and grow and there is not a wrong or right way to feel or not feel! SO, next time you start to judge yourself for being too emotional, remember, everyone else is just under-emotional (?). And also- remember, if you can feel the “bad” so deeply, you can also feel great things deeply, and that’s the greatest gift of all!!