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Lately I've become more and more aware of just how hard it is for me to access my feelings.
This has been hard for me to even consider, because so much of my identity has been wrapped up in ideas of empathy, shared humanity, the value of sharing feelings
In the past, much of my writing, and a large piece of what motivates my work in audio has to do with accessing feeling
But maybe a cautionary tale: I don't know when it happened, maybe the pandemic, maybe earlier than that. At some point, I subconsciously made the choice to acknowledge, but not FULLY feel my feelings, to care, but not care to the point of feeling the pain of others.
The other day, i realized this in a conversation with @jshaclark and I started to cry. Not like, full on bawling, but just some tears came. This had not happened in quite a while.
It's probably not a coincidence that our kids were away for the week and this was the first time in a while my wife and I had a long, leisurely meal with lots of deep, searching conversation.
I felt my soul shift in a way that felt uncomfortable, but more importantly, like a huge relief: I realized I had somehow grown incapable of true gratitude, of deep sadness, of genuine rage.
This may sound like a feature, not a bug. Did to me too, until I realized what stuffing my feelings was doing to me. I was often grumpy, frustrated not only by circumstances, but merely the existence of people in my life.
In a moment when social action = individual action I found myself largely unmoved by what was happening around me. I told myself I was putting up boundaries. But they were more like walls, and I'm afraid they kept stuff in more than it kept anything out.
It's a slow period of growth for me. I still feel afraid to cry, to lose my dignity in that way. But I'm tearing up more. I'm glorying in my children in a way that ends up with my heart feeling more full.
And I'm feeling the weight of everything in my life now in a way that I haven't always. I feel like I'm now truly capable of being present with others when before the best I could offer was my actual presence. Sometimes that's enough. But it's not everything I'm meant to give.
Anyway, in short, feeling became so hard that I did everything I could to stop. And it resulted in me feeling miserable without even realizing it.
TL;DR brains are weird
TL;DR brains are weird
