Just So You Know, Emotions Are Meant To Be Felt

Emotions are meant to be felt.

They’re not meant to be pushed down, ignored, or forgotten. They’re meant to be felt with every inch of your soul and every fiber in your being. Okay, maybe that sounds a little dramatic, but you get my point.

We tend to run away from feelings as if we can actually escape them when in reality they’re still there, and they’ll continue to pop up unless we confront them. If we don’t feel our feelings, then they don’t go away like most people believe, they just get buried down until one day they come back up tenfold.

Stop ignoring your feelings because of the fear of embarrassment, too. We ALL feel. We all get pissed off and say things we regret, and we all get sad and look ugly when we cry.

Crying doesn’t make you weak. Anger doesn’t make you a bad person. You can’t keep pushing down the feelings that are meant to be felt.

Think about it, have you ever had a really good cry where you were just sobbing and had tears on your lips that tasted like sal, and it sucked because it felt gross, but then you felt so fucking good? Seriously, think about it!

Didn’t you feel relieved, almost free, after you’d finished crying? It’s like this pain that you had in your chest had evaporated, like the pain had literally left you through the tears that ran out of your eyes. Yet, most people don’t like to cry because they feel ashamed.

Don’t feel ashamed! You’re not weak if you cry, but you are some kind of weird robot if you don’t. Some people are less emotional then others, yes, and they might not cry as much, but even the least empathetic person cries every now and then.

And what about anger? Why has anger become a feeling some people are ashamed to feel?

Because of people like me.

There are so many people, like myself, who spread this message about all the love we should feel for one another, about how grateful we should be for what we have, and all that good shit.

Those messages are really important, they are. That’s why you read them all over Instagram and on Twitter bios and Tumblr posts, because they mean something.

But I think we’ve reached this point where if we feel anything other than happiness or gratitude, we feel guilty. Like, how dare we—the people who have a house, food on the table, and a phone in our hands—feel anything other than grateful?

Yes, we do take things for granted that we should acknowledge more often, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to be mad if we drop that phone and it cracks. Don’t explode with anger obviously, but don’t feel guilty if you feel anger rising up.

I’m not saying stop being grateful, stop being mindful, or anything. I’m saying it’s okay if you’re not. I’m saying that it’s okay if you lose your way, and that it’s okay if you’re mad all night because of something you’ll realize later is really dumb.

Just because our lives aren’t the shittiest doesn’t mean that we don’t all have our own shit to deal with, and feeling feelings is a part of the healing process. If you’re pushing them down, then you’re not going to heal. Not until you figure out your shit, and that process begins by getting really fucking angry or sad. Accept that, and be okay with it.

Like Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson said in the movie Lady Bird, “Different things can be sad… it’s not all war!”

We’re human. We feel. Stop giving yourself crap about it.