Being someone who experiences every emotion deeply and completely can be really fucking hard. Not everyone is built for it, and I’m still not sure I am. People who feel things with the intensity of a thousand burning suns tend to find their own ways to cope. Some choose drinking or smoking or an array of substances, others choose medications and antidepressants, others don’t cope at all and live life trying to suppress the most intense parts of themselves. I’ve done two out of those three (although there’s plenty of other coping mechanisms people use).
As a child, I was told I cried too much, laughed too loud and was always asked why I had to be so dramatic all the time? Why did I have to be so dramatic all the time? I don’t fucking know I’m a child and I feel something so obviously I’m going to express that. I always found it so confusing being shamed purely for having and showing emotion. The claims that I was “too much” have followed me throughout the years, and it felt like the more I tried to be less in order to make those around me comfortable, the more uncomfortable I felt in my own skin. I would try to squeeze a mountains worth of emotions in a tiny trinket box inside my head and then be confused when the lock broke and this intensity exploded outwards from within. The thing about being an emotion feeling human being, is that emotions don’t stop. You don’t get to turn them off when they become too much, and you definitely don’t get to choose the initial emotional reaction that people and situations ignite within us. This is why emotional regulation is so important. Without it, things do get too much and it’s like our brain decides for us that we physically can’t handle anymore and shuts them off for us. For me, this looked like disassociation. I was being dragged through life, still outwardly dramatic as hell but internally only acknowledging a fraction of the true emotions I was carrying.
Emotional regulation comes in all forms, it could be a creative outlet, breathing exercises, or just recognising what it is in that moment what your body and mind needs, be that rest and recovery or discipline and self control. Once you can really get a handle on your emotions and decipher which ones you need to allow yourself to sit in and which ones might just need a bit of reframing, you can realise just how fortunate we are to be able to feel.
I think of how I feel when I find a new favourite song that I know I’m going to play on repeat for the next three days. I think of how I feel when I wake up to the sun pouring through my windows and the day is bright and beautiful. I think of how I feel when I look around a room and realise I’m surrounded by genuinely happy people just enjoying themselves. I also think about how I feel when I’m poorly and my mom’s placing a cold flannel on my head. I think of how I feel when I remember the comfort of my grandparents’ sofa as I napped before dinner. I think of how I feel when a friendship or relationship that has given me countless fond memories over the years comes to an end. Before anything else, I am grateful. I get to experience these things, and not just by being there, by actually feeling it. If we couldn’t feel these situations, life would be an endless play that we watch from the audience, never actually getting to hear the applause for ourselves. I feel things deeply, therefore I get to experience them deeply. I wear my sensitivity proudly, because this life and universe is supposed to be sensed. Feeling deeply is not my curse, it is my gift.
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