I have felt trapped within myself for months, years, of my life. I feel the emotions just sitting behind a wall in my mind. I don’t allow them to trickle out organically, I don’t let my body release them naturally, I let them build and build until I am bursting at the seams and crying from the weight. I don’t know exactly why I am like this. I don’t have a traumatic story from childhood that shaped me to not properly experience my emotions. Maybe I just learned from watching the women in my family consistently hold themselves together in the face of tragedy, knowing if they break then the family breaks. Not allowing themselves a moment of silent release, instead just moments of eruptive emotions.
I have developed a pattern in my life. I’ve been aware of it since I was in high school, but I have been unable to break it despite how much I try. For a while I prided myself on keeping it together and not showing much emotion when everyone else was. I would be silently watching as others cried around me, I’d go out of my way to prove I was stronger in some naive sense of maturity. I would hold it in for as long as I could, continuing to plow through life until the dam inevitably burst. I’d fall apart crying, unable to catch my breath and pull myself together. Each time this happened it seemed world ending and earth shattering to me, even if it wasn’t. It was as if all the emotions I kept inside of me came back tenfold in their intensity.
Eventually this would happen after a night of heavy drinking and partying. My defenses would be lowered, the alcohol and drugs taking its pound of flesh by forcing the unwanted emotions to the surface. I never realized that the emotions I would run away from were just reflections of how I felt on a day to day basis. I just always brushed it off as an emotional hangover, something that didn’t mean anything but would take days to recover from. I stopped drinking over a year ago now, when I finally realized that I could not handle the emotional aspects of alcohol. The anxiety and extreme low moods the next day were too much for me to handle. I was never able to pace myself while drinking for the most part, and the high I felt while drinking was equally matched with the low I felt the day after.
Then there were the times where I would go, go, go, not stopping for a moment of reflection and rest and the cost of it being burning out and reaching a new low. Sometimes it was being so busy, working full time and going to school. Sometimes it was just ignoring all responsibilities and procrastinating until the last minute and everything blew up in my face. At one point I was even working with a therapist to help me identify emotions, I felt like a child learning how to properly express how I felt. It didn’t stick for very long, and I felt like I was not doing a good job of it.
I’ve been on a rollercoaster of battling my emotions. Two and a half years ago when I moved back in with my parents, I thought I was finally putting an end to that cycle. I was back in a home where I wasn’t responsible for much, and I was in a space where I had nothing but support for any emotions I felt. For a while, it worked. I went back on lexapro, and it seemed like I was slowly getting more in control of how I was feeling. In reality I just wasn’t feeling moments of intense fear and panic, and the lexapro blunted everything else just enough for me to be able to ignore it. Emotions would bleed through inevitably, strong feelings I was never able to completely distract myself from. I chalked those up to a bad day, and that they weren’t that important. It was as if the only feeling I was comfortable addressing was anxiety. Any other strong emotion was uncomfortable and felt like something was wrong with me. The anxiety was at least familiar to me. I still remember the first time I was able to identify feeling rage. It was when my dad was in the hospital, and nothing seemed to be working and everything was so seemingly unfair. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had felt rage, I am generally not an angry person and I never have been. It was an odd experience to say the least, and I ended up so overwhelmed with the feeling that I cried and then distracted myself with work.
What should have been a red flag to me was that I barely cried during my dad’s funeral. I remember standing at the funeral home before we would all go to the church, the priest saying a prayer, and everyone crying around me. I just didn’t feel it. While I am aware that everyone grieves in their own way, I without fail, cry at funerals. So to not cry at my own dad’s funeral was way off for me. I spent the months after thinking I was fine, that I just got all my grief out before he died. I was wrong, and about 4 months after his funeral I seemingly just cracked.
I cried more in a two week time period than I had in the last 8 years combined. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t even properly understand what I was feeling, just that it was a lot and I was wholly unprepared to deal with it. That was in the summer, and things just continued to go downwards. The anti anxiety medication I had been on started giving me severe side effects, and I would end up switching medications in the fall of that year. In that time period I experienced the most intense, horrific, and infuriating mix of emotions. It was as if someone had turned the radio station in my head to scan, and turned the volume all the way up. There was little I could do to escape the feelings.
I eventually calmed down, was on new medication, but more blunted than ever. I hated it. For the majority of my teen years and adult life I ran away and distracted myself from emotions and negative feelings. Seeking only highs and false senses of happiness. At a particularly low moment, I realized that I am not myself. I was barely leaving the house, I was not interacting with people, I was barely living. Doing all I could to avoid anything that might trigger an intense emotion. I was scared.
I am still scared. I am tapering off all anxiety medications after coming to the conclusion that while I don’t want to live debilitated with anxiety, I don’t want to live without emotions. I want to experience joy, I want to celebrate with friends, I want to get satisfaction after completing a project. For that to happen, I need to be open to experiencing everything though. The tense feelings when I am uncomfortable, the panic when doing something that triggers my anxiety, the fear of not knowing what my future holds for me. Also learning that feelings and emotions don’t have to be so intense that I need to change everything in my life. Sometimes, I just need to cry. And that’s all, I don’t need to psychoanalyze myself to figure out why. Sometimes, I just am tired and that doesn’t mean there is a larger reason behind it.
I’m not sure when I got so off course, when I become terrified of experiencing emotions. I have always been someone who feels very intensely, who loves wholeheartedly, and chases new experiences even if I have always pushed away the negatives or romanticized them into positives. I lived for those moments of intense emotional highs. I just got so scared of the lows that I forgot just how good I can also feel. I will end with a quote that was the background on my phone for over 10 years, and one I deeply resonated with up until I became too scared. I want to live this way again though, and not band aid and distract from the low emotions this time.
