The Trouble with Feelings

If there is one thing that gets me, it's feelings.

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I grew up where feelings other than happiness were bad, and you were bad if you had these feelings. This resulted in troubles connecting emotionally with people, with hobbies, and with myself to the point where I didn't even know how to feel the feelings that I had.

When I finally moved out, I experienced all of these feelings that I had been deflecting and absorbing for years.

My first month on my own, I lived with a bunch of people who were in the same boat as me. Kids trying to find out who they are, how they think, how to live and more importantly how they are supposed to feel about every part of this new world without the influence of environments that were created for them long before they could make any choice for themselves. As people started making connections with others and finding their feelings towards the things that will bring them joy and happiness for the rest of their lives, I was being left behind.

My lack of connection with others and my struggle to find joy held me back to the point of breaking. Three months into living with others, I started to withdraw as I had done before, and I suffered by myself. The difference was that the people around me, who had seen me everyday, saw these changes too. But the thing with feelings is everyone has them.

Some don't want to overstep, some just think it's just one bad day maybe two. Others assume that if you wanted help you would just ask. And some don't notice, too wrapped up in their own life and not looking for disturbances in their own peace. Which, if I could live that way a whole lot could be easier.

But that fourth month, that fourth month was the first time I had felt in years. And I didn't know if I would make it through to whatever that next step of my life was.

It was the first time that I had interacted with the nuances of my own emotions. I had helped people through the chaos of their own emotions for what had felt like my entire life, but the complexities that exist within a person who feels their feelings and the layers of personal experiences that exist within feelings themselves was an entirely new beast that I fought for the first time in my adult years.

The tsunami and crashing emotions that I felt of joy, sadness, loneliness, disappointment, anger, they all attacked me to the point of becoming numb again.

This cycle continued to repeat when you are dealing with so much more than emotions in my case. It's been years since I started to live on my own But the biggest trouble with emotions was the fact that they never quite leave your mind.

They follow you when you can't feel them and shout at you when you feel them too much. They sit in the back of your head as you try to live your life as normal as society tells you, and worst of all the fact that we want to live like society tells us to invokes horrible binding emotions as well.

All around, feelings are tough.

Feelings are sometimes nothing but trouble and they force a pleasant day to turn sour, they bring stress and complications into our minds despite how much we wish we could control the stress of emotions overall.

But. Feelings are the reason that we have hobbies we enjoy and people we love, and the reason we smile and laugh to create boundless beautiful memories with ourselves and the people in our lives.

So, despite the fact that feelings are trouble, they are also the root of the beauty that lies within the eye of a beholder.