The Trouble With Emotions

Emotions are powerful, strong, messy, untamed, wonderful, simple, and complicated; a large part of what makes us human. They are what makes life enjoyable and what makes life unbearable. Sometimes, I wish there was a way to put them in boxes. A way to organise and designate emotions so that sorting through them wouldn’t be so hard; it wouldn’t be near as chaotic, much easier to deal with. But emotions can’t be boxed, not really. You can push them down and ignore them. You can hide from them but eventually, they just come back again, more intense and pervasive than before.

I think that part of the nature of emotions is that they can’t necessarily be contained. They are a force all on their own. There are certainly not enough words on earth to properly express the full depth of our emotions. Sometimes I think that it’s amazing that we can function at all considering the maelstrom of emotions that can and does exist inside of all of us.

Allowing yourself to feel and experience your emotions, good and bad, is the hardest part, I find. Especially when you have a lot of negative emotions that you’d much rather weren’t there at all. But as they say, you can’t have the good without the bad. Emotions like sadness, anger, pain, allow us to much better appreciate feelings of joy, excitement, and happiness.

I found that when I tried to lock down on only my feelings of pain, hurt, and fear that all of my emotions got locked down with them. Not feeling at all was easier than having to deal with the horrible mess of emotions that I didn’t want to face. So my emotions, pushed under the surface, simmered for years, building up, waiting for a chance to boil over.

It’s really scary to finally face those emotions, and let yourself truly feel them. It is one of the hardest things that I’ve had to do and it is certainly something that I still struggle with. I have a lot of fear which I have yet to wade through. Fear that has and continues to hold me back from truly living. All my fears were given far too much time to grow and spread, like a parasite, and though I’m much more aware of it now, the fear is still very potent. The fear I have is sometimes so intense that it scares me (hopefully that makes sense).

I know that I still bottle up my feelings to a certain extent, however I’m also much better at recognizing when I’m approaching the “danger zone”, when I have to take the time to let out my emotions in a healthy way (which for me usually means writing in my journal), instead of letting them fester. Otherwise I’d be speedily falling back towards dark places that I’d rather not visit again.

Even writing this was uncomfortable for me because it meant letting my emotions surface and acknowledging the ones that I’d rather not exist in my heart at all.

I’ll leave you with this quote, which I have found to be quite true:

“And the day came that the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom.” – Anais Nin