How do other people experience and process emotions? I was once told by someone that I needed to heal my emotional body, to realize that I am not my emotions. Or rather, that my emotions are not all that I am. But I do feel as though I am primarily my emotions, and that to ignore any part of my emotional life, to deny my emotional life is to deny my reason for existence. I’m well aware that there are many different ways of thinking about life, whether there is meaning, or no meaning, whether the search for meaning is useful at at.
Meaning is such an encompassing and potentially vague term-from the pre-determined meaning of fate or destiny, or god-led importance, to concepts of re-incarnation and karma, to little things, the value of every day life and that the mere fact/act of existence signifies meaning in and of itself.
I tend to fall into some amorphouse space between faith and science, not willing to wholly commit to, or wholly deny, either. By denying science, I don’t mean not believing in scientific practice and fact, but merely questioning a wholly rational/logical based way of perceiving the world. I believe in the intangible, in gut feelings and intuitive, in the ability to transcend purely hand held truths.
It’s comparable to how I believe in modern medicine and its technological and deep knowledge facets, but how I don’t believe in the current way healing is presented and handled. How the cost of treating someone is more important than being able to explore all potential ways of healing. How there is not enough of space for the emotional and spiritual healing to take place, in addition to the physical. How hospitals are not calm and comfortable, and serene, filled with loving energy. How we would rather pour massive amounts of random drugs through our systems than use massage therapy, couselling, chiropractic, yoga, things which yes, have been proven to have incredible preventative healing properties.
Why are we not allotted all of the comforting and nurturing that we require? Why are we lonely and in pain all alone? Why do we have to go to see counsellors and massage therapists? Why don’t we have people in our lives, in our communities that are skilled in certain areas, are sensitive, are accessible to anyone who needs them, as often as someone needs them? Why does it have to be about money, and those of us who don’t have it are relegated to a sickness of absence.
Health is not a luxury. We treat it as if it is, we treat health the same way that we treat our own time. Health is time-it is time to ourselves, it is having enough time to nurture ourselves and relax, love and be loved.
We should all have places in society which support and nurture each of our own skill sets and sensitivities. Places of actual community, where we are not forced to do things just for the money, not forced to waste our lives in pain and unneccesary suffering.
Pain is a part of life, I recognize this, and I’ve learned to value it, as much of my strength as come from deep moments of pain. Days when the world just seems so huge and overwhelming, when waking up and looking out the windows is too much for these heavy limbs and heart. It’s the kind of pain that can’t be explained, that is deep and empty, nostalgia, longing, sorrow, and loneliness all bunched up together, made into a fabulous but nearly unpalatable meal. “Kinda horrible and kinda heaven”, to quote Josette quoting me.
The struggle is in knowing how to deal with it, in knowing that yes, the darkness passes. But having an awareness of the darknesses of the world makes it harder to cope with personal darknesses. Because, even if you manage to come out of the other side of this, to see the sun and grass tomorrow morning, there’s always war and murder and violence and torture and rape and the end of the world to deal with. Even if they are not immediately present, there is always the looming possibility, in the guise of fear, bone shattering and heart clawing fear that ropes throuigh my veins and tricking my mind.
The cycle of anxiety is a bitter and sharp one. Being stuck in this annoying Beckett land of “nothing to be done” ( I’m probably even misquoting “Godot”). Just as one fear is dealt with, another one comes along, broader and more vicious than the last one, bright needle in delicate muscle.
This pain, these demons, this suffering, this darkness, all cliched terms, all wholly undescribable, whatever I call them, are so vast, are so deep. It feels like I’m trying to sleep my skin, like my emotions are so much bigger than this body I am in, that they almost have a life of their own.
Most of us don’t have coping mechanisms to deal with this vastness, this overwhelmingness, as it has been so pushed out of the everyday experience. Suffering is not extraordinary, except that we define it as such. Everything can be extraordinary. Our lives are regulated so that we don’t have the opportunities to feel and express our emotions when we have them, so we repress then, and get sick. So we are overwhelmed by them, until we’re completely shutdown, or have a nervous breakdown, mid-life crisis, whatever it manifests itself as.
Depression, anxiety, alienation, isolation.
I’m not saying that everyone has these experiences. There are truly amazing individuals who have had wonderful support and nurturing in their lives, and are fully able to experience emotions as they come, and have unique ways of working and living with them. They are integrated within themselves, for whatever reason. This doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “well-adjusted” or “successful” in the common notions of these terms, but within themselves and their lives, they are at peace. They know their way, and they know how to follow their path.
This is what I aspire to. To hear and understand my calling, to live beneath the trappings, to thrive in this life that I have, to know myself beneath the fear and judgment. To look eye to eye with another person and know that she is seeing me, and I am seeing her. I want to be bare boned and vulnerable, able to offer myself wholly and gracefully to those who offer themselves to me.
I will not live on a surface level, I will no longer pretend not to see what’s underneath.
This is about love, and it isn’t. This is real romance, not the watered down, evaporated concept of an expensive valentine’s day love. If I lost everything else, right now, as long as I still had my heart, my body, and my mind, then I would be whole and in love. Love is not frivolous, it’s not old fashioned, it’s not difficult, and it’s not easy. It’s not all marriage and happily ever after. It’s intimacy and desperation, and lonelinees, and comfort, and joy, and grace, and so many blessings. It has so many forms and permutations that there is no way to define it. Hollywood romantic love doesn’t conquer all, but real, changeable, lifeblood heartbeat body breathing love puts us back together, and keeps us there.
And so, we go from darkness and back into light, and our truer selves are not located in either space, but in the crossing between, in the liminal, in all of it together, taken as a whole. Compartmentable, but not separate.
And oh, life overwhelms me, and I spend so many hours bent over, head in my hands, rocking softly, breathing deeply to help it all pass through me. When it’s all so indefinable and everything tastes so broken and jagged. These are the times I can’t leave the house, these are the times when small talk becomes impossible, when life is forcing itself through my veins, and demanding that I take notice of it, scream it, feel it, listen to it. Other people can’t deal with seeing me this way, they don’t know what to do. It’s just the scary girl going crazy, curled up on the floor in the dark, listening to music and crying.
I always could wail.
It’s not comfortable to come face to face with that. It’s not comfortable to come face to face with me as I am, as I feel, as I exist. When you see me vulnerable and in pain, you see what you don’t want to experience, what you can’t understand. It isn’t that my pain feeds me, that my suffering proves that I’m alive, but it means that I am willing to sit up and face all of my life, that I can look at the things that frighten me and grow from them, learn how to live with them, learn how to welcome them.
That is why there is so much sorrowful, angry, and difficult art-it is one very powerful way of facing and dealing with our demons, of transforming them into something else, letting them flow out of our bodies and hearts, and into a container, a form for them to live.
We tend to avoid our pain and search for our joy. Joy is acceptable, joy is desired, therefore, we know how to process and transform joy through laughter, dancing, sex, celebration. We do not celebrate our pain, we do not honour our darkness, and so we have forgotten what to do with it, how it helps us, the gifts it brings us.
The gifts we bring ourselves.
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