I am writing a daily blog about my family and I being homeless as a means of processing my emotions about this and to take the lessons from it. If I help someone else along the way, that would make me very happy.
I am feeling ‘off’ today and I don’t quite know why. I think I’m coming down with a cold which doesn’t help, but I just feel…emotional? I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint it. There’s not any one thing that’s bothering me specifically, I just feel as though I could weep. And I’m not a weepy person at all. But I have embraced the process of feeling my emotions then releasing them, so perhaps this is part of the process. I don’t know, I’ve never done it before.
Whenever I have been through an emotional period, I have been very stoic. It’s how I was brought up. Crying gets you nowhere, was the mantra. You just have to get on with it. And God forbid there was any sense of self-pity. In fact, all outbursts of emotion were treated as self-pity and not allowed. You have to be strong was something I heard a lot in my childhood. I had to be strong for my mum when my dad left, not be a bother. I had to be strong when my beloved grandfather died, when my beloved uncle died, when the grandmother I adored, died. So, I learned to suppress emotions as inconveniences. I did the same with breakups because as I nursed my first broken heart, I was quite clearly told to get over it. I don’t think any of this was particularly helpful as I look back. Because I never learned how to deal with my emotions. And now, at the age of 54, I am trying to learn. I just don’t always know what to do.
We have all had periods in our life where we have had very strong, very tumultuous emotions, some we would much rather not experience frankly. But we have to feel them, we have to let them out or they become toxic. I am pretty sure that one of the reasons I got cancer was because all the emotions I had suppressed inside of me had started a level of underlying stress I was unaware of and which became physically toxic. I most certainly do not want that happening again. And I don’t want that underlying stress to lead to another heart attack either. So, I’ve got to get the emotions out and then release them.
It’s just hard when you don’t know what they are! I am sitting here feeling…I don’t know. Trapped is one of them. P****d off is another. Claustrophobic in the situation I find myself in. That’s how I feel, claustrophobic. I have managed to release the dragging anxiety I used to feel upon waking in the morning but feeling it and making the conscious decision to release it. So, I know I can do this. It’s just it is my immediate reaction to avoid feeling anything, really. To replace negative feelings with false ones of positivity. Or perhaps to feel the negative ones but not release them so they keep on persisting even if at a subconscious level. I don’t know, I just know I don’t always have a healthy approach to feelings or emotions, preferring them to not be there or when I go looking for what I am feeling there is just…nothing.
I don’t think it’s uncommon, I think a lot of people have an unsteady relationship with their emotions. How many of us are taught how to deal with them properly? I know I wasn’t either at school or at home. My mum prefers to suppress emotion or to explode into anger, directing it at anyone else. And I know that’s very unhealthy. But if I am to learn anything from what has happened in my life, how to process emotions healthily has to be on the top of my list. And I have come to the conclusion that it is feeling and releasing them. Letting them go and recognising that ignoring them is not releasing them. It’s kicking the problem into the long grass for it to come back at a later date in a much worse way.
I am also feeling nostalgic today. Nostalgia for my days at university, for being a part of a community with my son’s school (even if that wasn’t always a positive one), just nostalgic for…something. Why would I feel nostalgic? I really don’t know, I don’t understand that particular emotion. It’s so useless, there’s nothing you can do about it because you can’t go back into the past. It’s over and gone. But I guess there’s something about that time, some emotion being felt that I am trying to get back. Is that it? Maybe it was a sense of being a part of something and not being so now. I hate feeling nostalgic, I really do. Because there is nothing I can do about it. But, again, maybe it’s just about feeling it and letting it go. Accepting it rather than resisting it.
I don’t know, but if I had done this earlier with my emotions, perhaps I would have been in a better position to deal with the situation I now find myself in. Perhaps this isn’t something I would have created, because I do have to take full responsibility for my actions and role in it that has led to this. And I do. Perhaps if I hadn’t hid from my feelings or attempted to replace them with relentless positivity, if I had faced up to them and released them I would be in a better position. I don’t know, and I guess it’s useless to speculate. All I can do now is what needs to be done in order to move forward.
Because I am soaring. I am thriving. I am successful. And I am grateful.
Louisa Simpson 