Hello friends,
What are you learning and reading this summer? If you care to share with me, I’d love to know. I picked up my novel draft and started to comb it through. It is a project that I want to finish.
I thought about what I will share with you this week – nothing clear arrived. And here I am writing to you, hoping the act of putting words to paper will reveal Itself.
I want to vent to you about not feeling heard or seen – I feel sad and hurt. I want to talk about how depression is tightening its grip on me. I want to tell you I feel hopeless. I want to invite you into my dark room and let you see for yourself how ugly and miserable it is to be there. At the same time, birds are singing. I am breathing. Cookie dough is sitting in my freezer. The sky, clear blue. Sun, shining. The reality is large enough to house all spectrum of things. How about I try to focus my energy on the cookie dough part today? What if underneath all my hopelessness, something good is happening for me? What if I let myself believe that?
I live in a culture where logic is superior to emotions. I catch myself and others around me expressing emotions in sentences such as “ I think I am angry.” “It is annoying.” Rather using sentences, such as, “I feel angry.” “I feel annoyed.” I knew how to conceptualize and intellectualize my emotions like a pro. I didn’t know how to feel my emotions. This caused me problems. I was disconnected with my intuition. My emotions were strangers to me, rather than helpful guides.
When I first started learning how to feel, I was overwhelmed. How could someone possibly function with this much emotional data to work with? What do I do with all this information? I felt out of control. I am an educated and civilized intellectual! What is all this nonsense? How can I let myself be enslaved by emotions and passion?! No. There are more important things to attend to. I must take hold of my emotions by pushing them away. This strategy does not work for me. It has never worked.
What I have come to learn is that the simple act of identifying the emotion and giving it room will help me return to my center. It is easier said than done. And the trick is once I learned how to feel, I realized that I will need to feel for as long as I human. It is not a box I can check and say, from now on, I am free from feelings. What I freed myself from is the illusion that I have control over Life. I don’t know with full honesty who will wake up tomorrow morning and what she will do and how she will feel.
So, what’s the point? From feeling out of control to surrendering control? That does not sound like progress. For me, it is. It is me realizing with clarity what is in my control and what is not. With that awareness, hopefully, I can focus my energy and resources on what I can control – I am still practicing. The ability to actively choose and direct my energy gives me more range and mobility – I feel less stuck. I trust what I feel and I know what my intuition is telling me. As a result, my internal landscape got sturdier, wider and bigger – I dig this view.
My new challenge now is to feel my feelings and communicate my needs in a relational context. This will be a lifelong project my friends. And I am here for it.
I feel relieved now I have words on the page. Indeed, writing is my jam. Thank you for being here with me.
Xiaoyu
