Years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine about all the things going wrong, and she said, “I don’t even have the time to be upset about any of this – it’s like I have to pencil-in my nervous breakdown in between dentist appointments and band practice and work”.  How many of us utterly relate to that?

Of course, actual nervous breakdowns or depressive episodes are not controllable/manageable or able to be scheduled out – but we often experience varying degrees of the need to express our pain or grief, our exhaustion, our panic – and life is not conducive to fulfilling that need.  But, as many of us know, if we don’t get those feelings out, they’re going to build in pressure and explode one day like a shaken can of cola.

We’re told a lot of things, as adults, that utterly contradict our need to express our emotions or feelings, or the need to reach out for help.  “Stand on your own two feet”; “No one wants to see you cry”.  We’ve all heard, many times, a variation of the following statement: “Poor Lynn, she lost her husband and her father a month apart from one another – but you know, you’d never know it, she never cries or shows any pain.  She’s so strong.”  That’s not strength, folks.  I’m going to repeat this: that is not strength.  Poor Lynn is screaming on the inside, she’s just been trained that no one wants to see or hear it; and eventually, Lynn is going to break apart.  “Tough” is not the same thing as “strong” – let’s make that clear, once and for all.  “Tough” is just pain that got left out and alone for too long.  And it doesn’t move and bend with life, it’s rigid and hard.  Strength requires the courage to feel; being tough requires a decision to run away and hide from feelings.  But for most of our society, it has become the ideal – and that is nauseatingly dismissive, not to mention dangerous.  If you’re a woman, showing emotions or feelings means you’re “being hysterical”.  If you’re a man, showing any kind of sentiment beyond hunger, anger, or sexual attraction leads to a range of insults and judgements we won’t even mention, here.  And I’d love to know who started that idiocy.  Because this mindset is destroying humankind.  

We feel.  Man, woman, cis, trans, queer, straight, no matter our color or religion or preferred music style, we all feel.  I understand why we don’t want to – I don’t want to, either.  It’s exhausting.  And it makes us vulnerable and exposed.  The only emotion that I can think of that doesn’t make us feel that way is anger – anger fools us, anger releases hormones such as adrenaline and epinephrine that make us feel stronger.  Which is probably why so many of us choose anger over anything else, and why it’s called the “secondary emotion” as it’s most often a cover-up for hurt or fear – after all, who wants to admit they are vulnerable and human when they could just get rageful and act like an ass, instead?  

So, here’s the deal.  We can’t change all of humankind (wish I could, we are in dire need of an overhaul).  We can only try to do what we can in our own lives and with our personal worlds.  And as you step into this time of upheaval and pain and anger and panic on repeat, you have to pencil-in those times to feel.  Suppressed emotions stay within the body – and before someone can dismiss this as “hippie talk”, it’s physiology.  It leads to the tightening and constricting of muscles, a rise in aggression, stress-related illnesses, among other detrimental effects.  Everything we take in, needs to come out – this applies for feelings, not just food.  Everything we take in needs to come out in order for us to keep functioning.  And it isn’t just for your own health that this needs to happen, it’s for your kids, as well: this world is going to teach them that they don’t have a right to their emotions; you have to teach them that they do.  I was in my teens before I learned that “men aren’t supposed to cry” – because my grandfather and father, the two strongest men I’ve ever known, openly cried and expressed how they felt.  My grandfather wore a huge Wells Fargo belt buckle and cowboy boots, played poker, had been a Union man; and when he felt, he showed it.  He was expressive with his love and his sadness and his happiness, and so is my father; I had no idea that this was against societal norm.  When I learned that, when I was told that “Strong men don’t cry”, it seemed like the most idiotic statement in the world – especially because the person that said it to me couldn’t seem to handle so much as a papercut in his world without getting angry, and here were two men that had lived such intense lives, one of whom was a war vet, and yet they had no problem at all with expressing tears or love.  Strong men do cry.  Strong men do love.  Women are normal when they laugh or weep or stand up for themselves.   

The problem is – when are you supposed to fall apart?  When are you supposed to cry or scream or crumble?  We have kids and lives and errands and laundry and cooking and grocery shopping.   So we say things like “I don’t have the luxury to cry”.  But it’s not a luxury; it’s a necessity, just like eating.  How or when we can do it varies for each of us; some of us have five minutes and some energy left at the end of the night – some of us are better early in the morning before the kids wake up.  I used to build it into my work schedule.  There was a bathroom in my building that hardly anyone used, and I’d go in there for fifteen minutes and just cry.  On angry days, I’d go out to my car, get in, and scream and beat the steering wheel. (Disclaimer: Not too sure I recommend that.  People will see you.  I learned that the hard way when a woman knocked on my window and asked if I was ok.  My first thought was, “Well, I’m sure as hell not ok now…”  After that, I took a short drive when I needed to scream in rage.)  

The only way to get through this, sadly, is to feel it.  That’s the way you come out whole on the other side.  You break first; you feel the broken; then you start to piece it back together.  Lean into the pain, take the time to feel, and be gentle with yourself.