Learning How to Feel
It's so odd that we come into this world and learn to eat, talk, walk. We go to school and learn to play, tie our shoes, write, add and subtract. Our learning never really stops.
But nobody ever taught me how to feel. Nobody explained what happens inside of me when I experience emotions—beautiful, complex, always-changing emotions. So instead I learned ways of dealing with them, because I never learned how to actually feel them.
And I feel a lot. Big emotions. Some people don't experience things with the same intensity I do—exhilarating highs, pretty intense lows.
Now, at 59, I can honestly say I'm learning how to feel my feelings. All of them. No matter what.
It's not easy. It's some of the hardest work I've ever done. But the payoff is something I could never have imagined.
I'm becoming convinced my debilitating anxiety was never really about the things I feared the world might do to me. It was about my fear of facing what was already inside me. Apparently that was more terrifying to my psyche than most of the catastrophes I used to imagine.
Today I have a sense of wholeness that literally makes me cry with gratitude. An inner calm that rarely gets shaken. An okay-ness that drugs and alcohol never touched. I want more of it, so I practice being with myself and letting whatever's here be here, as much as I can.
Today Was Hard
My sleep has been intermittent, and today I overslept—I think I finally fell all the way asleep around 7 a.m., so I woke up with that sluggishness too much sleep creates.
It's Saturday, and for the first time in months I didn't have plans. It felt nice to just meander around. But something was going on inside of me that I couldn't put my finger on. I wasn't depressed. I was just meh.
Earlier, Alex had been upset with me. I understand why—there are things from our past that understandably trigger fear in him. I've learned that when he's angry, I can stay present with myself instead of rushing to change his experience. I told myself: it's okay for him to have his own experience, his feelings aren't our problem, we didn't cause them, we're not bad.
Usually that helps. Today it wasn't landing.
Then the Shift Came
I started the laundry, and in the safety and solitude of our bedroom, I burst out crying. Raw emotion exposed itself—the feeling of being a bad little girl, the one who somehow believed she was the reason Dad was drunk and Mom was suicidal. Horrible shame and guilt. I will never be enough, no matter what I do, no matter what I accomplish, no matter how hard I try to make up for it.
And underneath Alex being angry with me was something much older: I am the cause of his anger and unhappiness. That was the story. But this time I didn't have to become the story.
I stayed with the feelings. The tears ran down my cheeks, and I comforted the parts of me carrying the burden of that past. I'm here now, I told them. It's safe to cry. I'm not going anywhere. And strangely, the more I said it, the harder I cried.
The feelings moved through my body like waves of different kinds of energy. I could feel the sadness all the way down into my feet. I remember thinking: tolerating this kind of discomfort is really fucking hard.
Then a part of me said, I've been tolerating this my whole life.
That stopped me. I cried some more. Here I was, as an adult, thinking I deserved a gold star for staying with myself and tolerating these feelings—like I'd accomplished some extraordinary feat. And then I realized these young parts of me had been carrying this for decades. They'd already done the impossible.
I was humbled. We have no idea how strong children are.
An Emotionally Cloudy Day
So today I'm staying with myself. It's an emotionally cloudy day.
There's grief—for the pain and darkness of yesterday, for the years of my childhood lost inside other people's storms, for the part of me that wishes my husband understood this place inside of me and could hold me through it. There's the realization that this is my job now. It's my job to hold myself. There's an angry part who's pissed there was never anyone there to soothe her. And there's enormous gratitude that I'm here now.
What these parts seem to want from me is simple. They want me to stay—not fix them, not explain them, not talk them out of what they feel. Just be here, with these feelings, for however long they need to be here. Maybe all day. Maybe all weekend. Maybe all week. They're allowed to be here.
Capacity
This is a capacity I never had before—I think of it almost like a muscle, the capacity to experience myself. Building it has become one of the most valuable skills I've ever learned.
The more I let my nervous system and mind experience whatever washes through me, the steadier and more sovereign I become. And the less afraid I am. The more willing I am to face and stay with whatever arises inside me, the more fear seems to vanish from my experience. On most days now, I genuinely believe there's very little to be afraid of.
Maybe the thing I was terrified of all along wasn't life—it was my own reaction to it. I didn't believe I could tolerate what would happen inside me if something terrible happened outside of me. Once I started learning I could experience life as it moved through me, whatever it brought, the fear began to loosen its grip.
Think about your own worst fear. Losing your job—or what you imagine you'd feel if you lost it? Maybe we spend enormous amounts of our lives trying to control what happens outside of us because we don't yet trust our capacity to experience what happens inside of us.
Today I'm beginning to trust mine.
We Don't Have to Do This Alone
I'm so glad I'm not in this alone. I'm so glad you're here.
I want more people to relate to—people willing to simply experience and share what it's like to be human, so I can listen, be curious, and relate back. Maybe we don't always need to fix each other. Maybe sometimes we just need someone beside us while we learn that we can stay.