3 Emotions You Need to Experience to Understand.

I believe it is hard to understand almost anything until you have experienced it. This is especially true of emotions.

My reasoning for this is that emotions transcend language. You can try to explain an emotion to someone, but the explanation will only take you so far. Without direct experience, it is impossible to know the depth, length, and consequences of any emotion.

This is true of the entire gamut — from the dizzy heights of Love all the way to the depths of Despair.

1. Love.

Due to having the best parents in the world, love has been in my life since the day I was born. This kind of love can be described as always knowing you have a safe place to fall. As you go through life, with all its characteristic uncertainty, my rock in life has always been my parents.

For me, I did not understand love for anyone outside of my family until I met my wife. I realized love is about putting the other person before yourself and being happy to do so. I thought I had loved before, but I was too young and the “love” was selfish, although I did the best I could at the time.

These early and failed attempts at Love brought their own lessons into my life. Learning to let go gracefully, Forgiveness (including forgiving myself), and moving on without being scarred by the past.

Romantic Love is a partnership where one enriches the life of the other. You can add my wife to my “best in the world” list.

Be careful not to confuse Love and Lust. They feel very similar in the beginning. Sometimes you only learn by trial and error, but Love will always outlast Lust.

2. Depression.

I did not understand depression until 2009 aged 29. The build-up was a long one and began when I was 23 and suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This was a result of my work and led to me being medically retired aged just 27.

Like many people, my work was a huge part of my identity. I had authority and responsibility. Now I felt I had nothing.

Previously, I thought depression meant the same as “sad”. I did not appreciate the depths to which the mind can sink, the loneliness of depressions imprisonment.

While I still had all the love I previously described, I could no longer feel it. Depression puts a thick wall between the sufferer and the rest of humanity. No matter how much people love you, nothing penetrates The Wall.

This is the closest I have come to the feeling of being bereft without love or an anchor in the world.

Each day it felt like I was being swallowed by Quicksand. It took Herculean effort just to get out of bed in the morning and after washing and putting on Pyjamas, I was pretty much done for the day.

I lost the ability to read, exercise or study. Everything I enjoyed was taken away.

After YEARS of this, medication helped rid me of this terrible disease and the result is the far happier and fulfilled person that I am today. Previously I did not understand the human capacity for resilience. There is always something to be grateful for, even in the direst circumstances.

Hopefully, the vast majority reading this will never know what Depression feels like, but try not to use it as a replacement for feeling “sad”. Sometimes words matter.

3. Grief.

I did not understand grief until the death of my father in 2019. Prior to this, I had lost a grandparent whom I was not particularly close to, and dogs whom I was very close to and always found heartbreaking. However, nothing could prepare me for the avalanche of grief my father's death caused me.

One of the single greatest influences on my life was gone. One of those two anchors I mentioned at the start of this article was gone forever. I felt more vulnerable than at any previous point in my life.

Our small family unit had imploded out of nowhere. Old memories that were previously happy, now provided nothing but torment as I knew I would never experience such things again.

Then the questions start. I remember all the arguments we ever had and wonder if he knew I loved him.

I remember all the wishes he had for me and wonder if he would be proud.

I remember all the jokes and wish I had laughed just a bit more.

I remember all the games, holidays, birthdays, Christmases, all now forever tainted by his painful and irreplaceable absence.

Thankfully Resilience has appeared in my life yet again. The pain has not gone away but it has become manageable. I still have a hole in my heart but the hole does not threaten to overwhelm me.

I have learned to adapt and manage the pain instead of trying to eradicate it.

I hope one day I can remember him with a smile in my heart instead of a tear in my eye.

Resilience didn’t get its own category because it appears again and again. I am by no means unique in this observation.

Every life is littered with sometimes incredible examples of resilience. Just the act of being born sets the stage for this most glorious of character traits. It is more than just an emotion. It is a way of life and something I have full confidence you will understand because at some point you will have lived it.

Resilience has the potential to see you through anything. When you gain confidence in it from experience, you will be a formidable force and the world will be your oyster.