Hooked on a Feeling
Friday nights were the worst. I would stick my hand into my purse as I walked out of the glass doors at work and search for my travel pack of tissues. The ones that I hid in every coat, all my handbags, in the console of my car and the drawers of my work desk for the inevitable moments when my eyes would start leaking, often unexpectedly and always aggravatingly. As I watched everyone else leave work and make their way home to kids and spouses and pets and out to dinner with friends, I would climb into my car and hear nothing. A nothing that was alarmingly loud. Before I turned the car on I always noticed the pause, the in between, when I could hear myself sigh and feel my body slump in defeat, a punctuation point where I was reminded of how alone I was, silence my only companion. Fridays were the day of the week when my grief group, my tennis lessons, and my writing classes never seemed to meet. And after living in California for only a few months, I still didn't have any real friends. Friday was the one day that, every damn week, I had to face the unavoidable: my loneliness.
I don't know when I got used to being alone, but it may have had something to do with it suddenly becoming an option. Six months into living in California and I finally started to make some friends. But my first friend, loneliness, would still beg to make plans and many times I would masochistically choose it. I'd turn down dinner plans or a trip to San Diego in order to sit in solitude with my travel tissues, a glass of wine, and books titled When Things Fall Apart and The Dark Night of The Soul.
I was 13 when my parents divorced. My mom moved out of my childhood home and I remember walking downstairs to see an empty basement when I got home from school one day. She took the furniture with her and I wasn't expecting that. The absence of something so familiar — the plaid couch, the sound of her voice, the way she cooked — jolted me into a year of numbness. I didn't cry. I barely spoke. I sat in my room for hours on end listening to Pink Floyd and reading mystery novels, avoiding whatever feelings I had about the matter because I didn't know how to process them, express them, or even clearly define them. I didn't know if I was mad or sad or confused or lonely. My parents put me into therapy and I sat on the therapist's couch in complete silence and then left when the hour was up. And I continued living in complete disconnect from my emotional body until I turned 32. It was September 17, 2018. I had been officially divorced for 19 days, my birthday was the day prior, and when I went to change my name back to my maiden name, I retrieved my divorce decree and the dam violently broke. Two decades of repressed emotion erupted from a volcano that I thought was dormant, and the lava continued to flow for nearly three years. Until that point, I would boast about how I never cried. It was like a badge of honor, being a woman who identified as unemotional. When really I was severely out of touch with who I was and my experience in life at any given moment. I didn't give myself permission to feel anything, which inevitably translated to way fewer sparks in life, including all of the colorful ways that life can make sparks.
An article in Positive Psychology states that a human can experience 34,000 different kinds of emotion. Our primary emotions (happy, sad, bad, angry, fearful, surprised, disgusted) branch out into secondary emotions, followed by tertiary emotions, and so on, creating a complex and multilayered human experience. Google "emotions wheel" and you'll see a comprehensive image of the multitude of emotions that one may experience, however fleeting or everlasting. When my dam broke, I vowed to let myself feel my emotions.
And feel is exactly where the pendulum swung and stayed for quite some time. It was the most confronting, uncomfortable, and exhausting period of my life. I would sit in sadness or loneliness for days on end, unable to right the ship, choosing to sit in the suffering no matter what. And it wasn't until just last week that I finally pieced together the value in feeling and then processing and then rerouting. Avoiding emotion will only suppress it and let it fester until, in all likelihood, it materializes in some physical way in your body and eats away at your soul. But feeling something without properly processing and expressing it can be just as detrimental.
My 8-year-old niece is going through a particularly challenging emotional time and my sister shared with me how she helps her name her feeling, feel her feeling, express her feeling, and then choose something that will help her shift to a new feeling. Which gives permission to have the experience of moving through something without also sitting in it for hours or days on end. It teaches her to process the emotion without getting stuck, something that we both concluded many adults don't even know how to do. Something that I am now committed to practicing and speaking about so emotions can be celebrated, honored, and explored in the healthiest of ways. And so I can become better at self-soothing instead of running to my therapist any time an issue arises.
Name it. If you can't pinpoint it, google the emotion wheel and scan it for what matches your emotion best. Give yourself time to properly identity it.
Feel it. Instead of avoiding it, making yourself busy, or repressing the feeling, give yourself the opportunity to feel it. That will look different for everyone. For me, it takes being still, closing my eyes, and paying attention to my body, my breath, and my thoughts associated with the feeling.
Express it. You could talk it out with a devoted listener, write in a journal, film yourself speaking, move your body, listen to music, get out in nature, meditate, dance. Whatever helps you bring the emotion to life and into existence — that's how it will lose its power and begin to transform.
Shift it. After you've spent some time (which could be 10 minutes or 10 hours) naming, feeling, and expressing your emotion, do something that will help you shift to a more positive state. This is the step I was missing for quite some time. I highly encourage you to make a list of what brings you joy. For me, it's moving my body, watching stand up comedy, watching the sunset on the beach, and making a big ol' mess in the kitchen.
I lived in the world of emotional avoidance and in the world of emotional saturation and am intending to dance in the world of emotional balance so that I can experience sadness and boomerang back into joy. I can honor my anger and ricochet into excitement. I can feel lonely and eventually shift into gratitude. It can all exist together, apart, and every which way in between. Because we are complex humans living in a rich world where we are all just trying to "figure it out." Give yourself grace. Let the dam break. And hop onto the roller coaster with me. It's way more fun to be on it together.
