I’ve always had a reputation for being happy-go-lucky, for as long as I can remember. My mom will always reminisce that I was the “smiliest” baby she ever knew. I get comments even now that I always have a smile on my face or that I’m the first to make a room laugh. My friends have told me that I am a ray of sunshine, a big ham whose enthusiasm is infectious.
But, it comes with its flip side, because often I feel like a big grey rain cloud. Sometimes it seems like I have so many feelings that they’re going to swallow me whole. I have joked with my friends before that I have “too many feelings for my tiny little body”, but jokes aside, it is the best way that I have found that describes it. It’s not exactly that it’s always sadness—I often find myself tearing up when I listen to a song that is joyful and has lovely harmonies or a movie that touched me. I’m notorious in my family for crying during movies; every Christmas, my uncle will lightly tease me for wiping my eyes at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. I get such strong waves of appreciation, love, and happiness that I feel like I could drown in them.
However, it’s not always so positive. I am plagued by feelings of melancholy all the time, and it’s something I have had a hard time shaking off my back lately. It can come from anywhere or anything, from a bad spat of weather or even that a shirt I wanted to wear is dirty. It affects me down to my core, like a deep chill in my bones. I feel like instead of wearing rose coloured glasses that I’m looking at the world through shades of blue.
This feeling of blueness is only worsened by the guilt I feel for feeling so strongly. “Why should I be so sad, when there are others that are doing so much worse than me?”, I’ll tell myself. Or, god forbid, I cry in front of someone or let my emotions show. “They think I’m trying to manipulate them,” I tell myself, or, “They will think I am crazy for how I’m reacting.”
All which leads me back to keeping it to myself, making it worse.
So often, as young women, any strong feeling that we have is cast in a negative light. If you’re annoyed, you’re a bitch. If you’re angry, you have PMS. If you are sad, you’re trying to make a man feel guilty with your “ways”. If we’re not smiling or pleasing to the eye, it’s an unacceptable emotion to have.
Yet, we have feelings for a reason, and they’re what make us human. Pretending they’re not there will do you no good. It’s taken a lot of conditioning, both from my friends and eventually myself, to realize that it is important to feel my feelings. I’ve come to love the feeling of calm and relief that follows a good cry, and I’ve made playlists tailor-made full of tearjerkers. I’ll sit down every now and again to watch a movie that addresses the emotions I feel. “Feel your feelings,” has become a mantra that I repeat to myself almost daily, and although it hasn’t been long, it has already done me so much good. I find myself panicking less over little things I can’t change, and the waves of melancholy I feel are getting less and less intense. I have come to realize that the intense blue I feel isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it can be quite purifying. I can’t fully appreciate the highs if I don’t experience the lows. In-text photo courtesy of Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/cE24Zad4SEU