Feelings Are Not The Enemy
You can’t close yourself off to grief without also closing yourself off to joy
In honor of World Mental Health Day, I’m sharing one of the most perspective-shifting conversations I ever had with my therapist. I hope that wherever you are in the world this story adds some softness to your day.
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“Many people can compartmentalize their emotions, but you appear to have no compartments”, my therapist said in a session last year, smiling the way she always smiles when either of us finds language to explain the ramshackle carnival of my colorful psychology. It’s true. I have no compartments. Which means, in the house of my heart, there are no old wooden trunks, no lock boxes, no air-tight distractions in which I can hide away a single ounce of pain. When I say goodbye to someone, I can’t tuck their photo into a locket inside a jewelry box I’ll rarely open. They become a life-sized poster on my bedroom wall. “Why on earth is that still up there?” my friends ask, ten years after a break-up, not understanding I have no storage.
“For someone who is not anonymous, you are really comfortable wailing in public”, my partner said to me in the grocery store a few months back. But I’m not at all comfortable. I simply don’t have any pockets in which to keep my anguish until I’m out of earshot. If I’m devastated in the peanut butter aisle, everyone without a peanut allergy will know.
There are days I think this the suckiest fate in the world. But more often, I know the opposite is a far more brutal path. For much of my life I had nothing but compartments. A million secret corners to hide the hurt in. Someone could chuck a grief-brick at my chest and a catcher’s mitt in a rust-sealed box in the attic would reach out and grab it without me feeling a thing.
Back then, I’d lose someone and an hour later be singing in the shower, my sadness a fitted sheet I could fold perfectly and tuck in the linen closet for months before remembering it was there. High school can be rough on almost everyone, but in four years I don’t recall crying more than a couple of times. I had a reputation for skin so thick it was as if I was lined with lockers no one knew the combination of. When I finally went searching for the combination to my locks––everything changed. But not how I had expected.
“You can’t close yourself off to grief without also closing yourself off to joy,” my therapist said. “Imagine it like a kink in a hose.” I soon had proof that every attempt I’d ever made to stop the flow of my despair, anger, and fear––had stopped the flow of my bliss at the same time. I’ve witnessed it on others too. Here’s an example: For years I’d known people who tried to pretend they did not feel lonely by surrounding themselves with strangers in bars every night of the week. But it was when they decided to feel the loneliness, to keep the other half of their bed cool and empty, that they finally opened themselves up to love. Another instance: I watched my partner lose her dog and bury the feeling in television and sleep, but the day she let herself feel the grief (by writing the story out), she began crying the cobwebs out of her heart, and the following day had enough room in there to begin looking for another animal to rescue. To love.
And I suppose that’s to say that a person can be happy because they’re miserable. Which is, maybe, another way of saying misery doesn’t completely suck.
Friends, today, if grief climbs in your window, imagine the light that might be climbing right behind it. That sucky feeling could very well be breaking down the wall that has kept your joy out too.
Love, Andrea 🖤
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