by I find it strange that being emotional is considered a negative trait. Humans consist of mostly their thoughts and emotions, and the very act of having an emotion makes someone emotional.
Why would we not want people to be emotional? What is so scary about emotions? Everyone has them just as everyone has thoughts.
Our feelings make up a large part of our very existence. What is the point in trying to pretend they are not there? Without them, we’d merely be robots, simplified to the existence of a machine. This mentality robs us from such a fundamental part of the experience of life.
There is no need to always be completely thoughtful nor logical all of the time. Sometimes the feelings you experience don’t need some sort of logical conceptualization. Sometimes the act of experiencing a strong feeling is enough, without needing to find the mental backing to support it.
I was afriad of my emotions for far too long. I tried to push them away, but in doing so, they only became more intolerable. It didn’t matter if the emotion was deemed positive nor negative because once I started pushing away the negative emotions, I also became scared to feel too positively.
I notice this in others as well. Maybe if they feel too strongly in any direction, they may try to tone down the feeling, essentially becoming ashamed and trying to hide it from view. Sometimes being too happy or excited is looked down upon.
For a while, if I got too happy, I would strangely enough feel a bit of guilt later on about the experience. I am not too sure if guilt is the right word honestly, or if it’s better to say I’d feel embarassed? I worried that expressing too much looked crazy. I thought it would be better to pretend like I wasn’t feeling anything at all.
But in doing so, I only became depressed. I forced myself to feel nothing and this only made me feel empty. I didn’t understand at the time how valuable emotions can be regardless of how much we may stigmatize them. If we rid ourselves of such an important part of our very existence, we miss out.
It’s strange that “being happy” is such a fundamental goal in many people’s lives because happiness is only temporary. There doesn’t exist any state of permanent satisfaction with life. The same is true with all emotions. None of them are permanent. They come and go, and all we can do is accept those which come even if at times they can be quite uncomfortable or intense.
Perhaps what we should look for instead of happiness is acceptance, or even compassion. If we are always, or in the least, mostly, compassionate towards ourselves for all that we feel and think, accepting fully everything that we are, maybe we will be generally fulfilled in life.
I am starting to learn how to love my emotions, but also appreciating the feeling of hating them at times as well. Really, we shouldn’t assign value to what we feel because nothing is truly positive nor negative. It just is. We can try to run away from our emotions, but they won’t ever fully leave. We can pretend that we feel nothing, but doing so will only detract from life instead of add to it. I want to fully experience it all, through the pain and hardship, beauty and excitement, and love and hate that make up the experience of life.
As much as I hate my emotions sometimes, I love the fact that I can feel so deeply. I’m learning to embrace the full picture, understanding that life isn’t complete without both love and hate, happiness and sadness, and elation and anger. It’s impossible to be happy if you’re never sad. It’s impossible to love fully if you don’t understand your hate. Elation is meaningless if you choose to hide your anger away. None of these feelings would exist if not for their counterparts. So the next time you feel very sad, just know that this experience makes happiness possible and if you want to live a happy life, then the only way to do so is to let yourself be sad from time to time.
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