How You Feel Matters

You know how we like to say that we’re being irrational, or we’re overreacting when we feel the moment at hand shouldn’t have caused the emotional response in us that it did.

We wonder what’s wrong with us, we feel shame, embarrassment, we ignore it and move on, or we claim it as an identity of being unbalanced and unstable.

We are quick to tell ourselves, our bodies, our emotions, that they’re all wrong to feel the way they’re feeling.

But I think maybe it’s not that we’re being irrational when we have an emotional response to something. Emotional and physical responses don’t happen for no reason, there is always something that they are connected to. And if the moment at hand doesn’t seem to match the emotional and physical response you’re having, then it is not the moment at hand that your body is responding to. Before you call your response irrational or wrong, realize that you need to see outside of the moment in front of you.

Your emotions are always valid and your tears are never irrational.

But when we say it’s irrational and invalidate ourselves by calling it an overreaction, we are silencing ourselves and our emotions and our body will have nothing else to do but get louder and louder.

In the same way we treat ourselves poorly because we are not seeing correctly, we treat other people poorly by not seeing correctly. Treating someone else poorly, I believe, means that you are not seeing yourself correctly or you are not seeing them correctly.

Now there are all kinds of nuances to this, and it is not an excuse of accepting abusive behavior or anything of the kind.

But it is less likely that you are a terrible person or they are a terrible person, and much more likely that one or both of you are responding to things unseen or misconstrued.

I think It’s helpful and important to understand this because, in difficult times, it allows for both people's humanity and identity to stay intact. While they, or you, or both are responding in the safest and most comfortable way that is understood.

What now?

Well, what if it is not the way you can endure all of this, but the way that you can feel?

So much of my life has been endurance, resilience, persistence, and tenacity. And that’s got me far, but with only those things, I have only seen how far I can go carrying everything. Endurance does not build something beautiful, it only holds the potential of beautiful.

What builds, nourishes, and creates something beautiful is the feeling of it all.

It is the way the pain of life moves through your being and filters through your heart that creates something beautiful.

Much like a water filtering system.

I think sometimes we’re afraid to feel because we expect that it will come out of us the way it came in. But it only leaves us the same if we push it away as is.

If we let it be transformed through grief, sadness, or however it needs to flow in the presence of our love, it can and will leave us differently.

Maybe it is not being in pain that is the problem, but the running from it, but the refusal to feel the pain and let it become something else.

Pain doesn’t have to go back into the world as more pain.

Hurt doesn’t have to beget more hurt.

It stops with us.

It changes when we change the way we engage with the world and with ourselves.

It changes when we feel differently.

How you feel matters.

With Love,

Sarah.