Feel The Burn

This has been one of the more trying days I have experienced in some time.

After trial and tribulation, one after the other, I almost found myself stuck ruminating on negative situations that occurred throughout the day. For starters, I dropped my phone in the kitchen and shattered the glass back Why are they making phones out of glass? That is seriously just asking for some shattering shards to fly into an open wound and it doesn't even have to be a physical wound, a deeply internal one can also suffice.

The next catastrophe to occur was when I sat down to work on an article I started a few days ago but hadn’t had the time or wifi to finish. Without wifi, I was unable to save the article from the last time I was connected. Are we sure Mercury isn’t still in retrograde? I thought restarting my computer would possibly help with the connectivity issues… Probably would have helped to copy and paste my article onto a digital notepad and save it before restarting to update, but alas, I found myself saying tata to the majority of my article.

To top it off I brought the wrong headphones to work, so I had to wrestle my other ones to stay in my ear. They ultimately won, as I saw no point in continuing with the struggle.

Small tedious catalysts like this tend to be the breaking point for bigger issues that we may not be fully dealing with, or are yet unable to handle.

I could feel myself bringing up more stress than I needed. I was settling into the familiar comfort of distress, wishing I wasn’t. Wishing I was feeling anything else. I was discontent working through the rest of my shift and I was probably going to continue wallowing until something shifted.

I will thank this shift to a visitor coming into work who also seemed to be going through a struggle. She had just attended a funeral and the straps on one of her heels broke. Her husband and son were mocking her a bit, wondering if she was always this chaotic when coming in and it hit me that maybe I wasn’t the only one going through some sort of tribulation. Now yes, I am well aware that plenty of people struggle with both big and smaller tedious things on a daily basis. This is not what I was taking comfort in.

What comforted me was how she handled it. A little frazzled by the events herself, she confided in me and yet kept an upbeat attitude despite her chaos. I saw an opportunity to take notes for myself and simultaneously brighten her day by validating her experience. By changing my attitude, we soon found that we were both not alone on today's Struggle Bus. We found comfort in one another’s struggles without tipping the scale on who had it worse. Instead, we reveled in the Buck Moon’s chaos and trodded on forward with our evening.

This turn of events got me thinking about feelings. I had almost given into my frustration and let it get the better of me. Had I done so, more frustration was bound to follow. It always does. I have often watched others in a frustrated state furthering down their path only to become more frustrated by something else. That is how it was turning out for me. I had not quite fully dealt with what was truly bothering me and the events of the day were forcing me to work on the underlying issue.

I could either continue to have problem pile upon problem or I could deal with the initial one. This is where the epiphany for this article came to me.

I am beginning to believe that we sometimes hold onto what we deem “negative emotions” because it honestly feels kind of good. There is something deeply rooted at the base of these types of feeling that can hurt like hell but also feels oddly pleasant at the same time. I have only one explanation as to why this could be and that is because it feels good to just feel in general.

Often we can be so quick to numb a feeling with whatever our vice of preference happens to be. Whether it is smoking, drinking, or endlessly scrolling on our phones we all seek to numb unwanted feelings. When we do this, we become adjusted to being uncomfortable with anything we label as “unpleasant.” More often than not, those feelings don’t even fully go away when we numb ourselves, they just evolve into a more mutated one.

We have become so accustomed to numbing that what we are really doing is heightening our sensitivity to our feelings. When we don’t numb, we are feeling things at a baseline level, which can cause things like frustration to feel a twisted sort of good. We have slowly forgotten how to embrace our feels. We are human and we are met to feel all the things, whether it be intuition, emotions, or simply just feeling ALIVE.

Which is what feelings are there for, so that we can remember that we are living breathing beings. This is why adrenaline junkies enjoy jumping out of planes, they want to feel more lively. They are seeking to feel something and adrenaline is a powerful something at that.

It is when we begin to stop feeling enough that life really starts to chuck the lemons at us. Nothing like a good citrus burn in a hidden boo-boo to make you feel alive. What is important to remember is that it is okay to feel. Get a good sit down going and just feel out whatever your body is trying to say. When you have given yourself a moment to feel that pain, do me a favor and drop the damn lemon would you? Why are you carrying around something that hurts?

Ah, probably because you have been ignoring something bigger. You have been bottling it up for too long, so you wanted to feel something else, such as that of a lemon’s puckery burn. Nothing feels better than focusing on the feelings and emotions of the present, giving it its time to speak until you are fully ready for release. And the minute you let it go, you have opened the door to the energies that were trying to get in, but couldn’t until you squeezed that lemon for all it was worth.