Feeling is Healing

Something I've talked about a lot on my podcast is my current journey toward healing. I think for a majority of my life, I've actively worked against healing. Most of the time, I didn't realize I was doing it. I fully bought into the cultural narrative I grew up with that says that pushing things down, ignoring painful scenarios, and gritting your teeth through things that hurt or bother you is a sign of strength, maturity, and adulthood. Imagine my surprise when I found out that that was the perspective that was causing me the most damage.

Regardless of the harm it has caused me, I understand why those perspectives existed. They're useful in their own way, I suppose. When I look at the stock I come from --gritty, persistent, earthy, tough--I can appreciate that those values served them. Survival is sometimes not easy, and surviving under the societal and cultural (and even parental) oppression many in my family experienced made it necessary to put on a bulletproof exterior, becoming impervious to nearly everything --bad or good. I never noticed much in the way of sentimentality among them or prioritizing emotional well-being, and that rubbed off on me in the sense that I learned that emotions were inconvenient little nuisances. Disregard them and move on.

That wasn't always easy to live by in practice, though. The more I got hurt by how people acted towards me, things I went through, and injuries I sustained, the more I became convinced that something was wrong with me. I thought: I wouldn't be feeling these terrible, painful feelings if I was mature enough like everyone in my life was. I wasn't truly an adult if I couldn't stop feeling hurt or affected. So I carefully constructed a worldview and a perspective that actively supported hurting myself. I didn't know the truth --that things like love and friendship shouldn't destroy me on the inside; that people shouldn't use me for their own gain only to neglect me later; that I should not be cast aside when I stopped being useful. So I ended up believing a lot of half-truths (read: lies) --that I was the problem in all my relationships; that I would always be abandoned, ridiculed, or excluded if I expressed that I was unhappy about something; that I needed to become small in order to fit into everyone else's world, that people naturally couldn't want me around, because who would ever want me around?

That got me into trouble both in a real sense --personality dysfunctions, interpersonal relationships, general living-- and in a psychological sense --unhealthy coping, lack of self-worth, etc. I developed depression (I don't know if "developed" is the correct term there. I know I've been living with it unnamed for a majority of my life, but I don't think I was born with it). I drank. I numbed myself with social media, youtube videos, chatrooms, and later doomscrolling. I made more meaningful connections with people on the internet because I could not find (or was too scared to attempt) deep meaning in the relationships in my real life. I believed the lies people told me and convinced myself that I could not trust my own gut instinct. I pushed things down so much and so often that I would explode all at once without warning, leaving lots of people confused as to my reaction and leaving myself more hurt at being misunderstood or invalidated.

The longer I live, the more I realize that burying things or running away from feeling was actually causing (or maybe exacerbating) this brokenness in myself I couldn't overcome. I was caught in a cycle of trying to fake being okay and trying to grit my way through everything --exactly what was modeled for me--but it would only work for so long until the carefully constructed facade came crumbling down again and again and again. Leaving me more bruised, more broken, and more angry.

I'm in an era of my life that calls for a lot of rebuilding. Over the last 5 years at least, many things have been removed from my life or taken from me. There have been dramatic redirections and painful separations. I look around, and I can't help but see that in many ways I'm at ground zero again. From time to time, that honestly feels terrible. I feel like I have nothing to show for what I've been through, and I feel like I will never get back on my feet. I feel stagnant, and I feel lost, and I feel lacking, and I feel like I want to do so much more than what I'm able to do right now...

But I think that's the point I'm trying to make. I feel. I think healing and feeling go hand in hand, because there was a point in my life where I would run from that. I would put on a brave face and grind my teeth and pretend that, whatever it is, I have it under control; however it's going, it's going well, even if I was dying on the inside. It has taken me almost 35 years to (sometimes) accept the fact that it is okay to feel. That feeling, actually, is part of what it takes to be a whole, entire person. Feeling whatever you feel (many times without acting on that feeling) is the first touchpoint with honesty, and being honest is living in the Truth. And the Truth shall set you free, I believe.

I'm sorry to younger me for believing that feeling made you weak or diminished you somehow. I'm sorry for letting you get hurt and not standing up for you because I believed that we needed to get hurt in order to be loved. I'm sorry I never listened to you and the pain you were in. I'm here now. I'm listening now. And whatever you feel, we can feel it together.