Feelings, nothing more than feelings (?)

I want a new drug…

One that won’t make me feel too bad

One that won’t make me feel too good.

Huey Lewis may well have captured our American psyche when he sang this song, even if unwittingly. Accepting who I am, beginning to live wholeheartedly, has enabled me to feel more deeply and intensely than most any time in my life. I have cried more in the past twelve months than I probably cried in the preceding forty-plus years. Heck, I may have cried more in the past month than in the previous forty years. It’s not just about crying though. It’s about allowing myself to experience the fullness of my emotions. It’s about vulnerability. (There’s that word again.)

When I was hiding from myself, denying my true identity, I couldn’t risk vulnerability. To protect myself from that I learned, among other defenses, to numb myself. Brené Brown addresses this in her book Daring Greatly. She emphasizes that numbing isn’t necessarily about addiction to pain-killers, or drugs, or alcohol, though it can include any or all of those.  It’s about trying not to feel too much of something that we don’t want to feel. It’s about disconnecting from our emotions because our emotions are too dangerous. They make us vulnerable. “We’re desperate to fell less or more of something – to make something go away or to have more of something else,” she writes. We want that drug Huey sang about.

Now most of us, myself included, would be happy to feel all the joy and pleasant feelings we can. That’s what we want more of. But we can’t, because life doesn’t work that way. As I’ve embraced the fullness of my life in the past year, I’ve had days of great emotional highs, but I’ve also had some really deep lows. I’ve had days where I was barely holding myself together, and days where I felt like I was walking on sunshine (cue Katrina and the Waves). If I numb myself to try to experience less of the low points, I’m going to lose the high points as well. “Numbing vulnerability also dulls our experiences of love, joy, belonging, creativity, and empathy,” writes Brown. You can’t have the joy without accepting the potential (likely?) pain as well. It just doesn’t work that way.

Brown links our numbing behaviors to fear of inadequacy. We fear that if we reveal our true feelings, our “weak” emotions, people will pounce on us and destroy us, or shun us, leaving us isolated and alone. Our culture emphasizes those who are successful and strong. Emotions are for the weak. We feel inadequate because if we were only more ___________, we wouldn’t feel this way. We’d be able to handle anything that came our way.

What I am discovering as I embrace my true self and live in the light is that I am enough as I am. I am worthy; worthy of love, of belonging, of equal treatment. I am learning to accept myself with all the messy incompleteness that is me. Are there areas I want to grow and improve in? Certainly. But that does not mean I am not enough. It doesn’t mean I am unworthy. It just means I’m human. Accepting myself as I am has freed me to accept my emotions as they come, to feel them fully, to breathe them in and exhale them, without feeling like I have to hide, deny or suppress them. I try to be aware of the context and express myself within measure, but I don’t want to hide my feelings from my friends. More than once I have walked into my dance studio and broken into tears, because I know that’s a safe place to do so, a place where no one is going to judge me, laugh at me, or find me inadequate. We all need those places.

Tears don’t necessarily equate with sadness either. The other day I was driving to pick up a friend, listening to a beautiful piece of music on my car stereo and looking at the bright white clouds against the brilliant blue sky and I started crying because it was a moment of such poignant beauty. And I drank the moment in, not trying to hold it forever, just savoring its sweetness. Another day I was crying to a song on the radio because it awoke feelings of grief and sadness. I let the tears flow.

Sometimes I still want that pill. I want to not feel so deeply, to not hurt so much. But really I don’t. I don’t want to numb myself to life anymore. I want to live it in all its fullness, confident that through it all I am enough and I am worthy.