Feel Your Feelings

Dear Little One,

I think the most ridiculous sounding advice I will ever give you is to feel your feelings. It sounds silly. It sounds entirely unhelpful and obvious. But it is so incredibly important—and difficult.

Feelings are so scary. They are confusing and overwhelming and at times entirely unpredictable. They can define your mood and make or break a day right from the start. They are hard and painful and wonderful and invigorating.  They are everything all at once.

In many ways, you have no choice but to feel your feelings. They sneak up on you, they devour you, they are you at any given moment. But there will be many opportunities to quiet them, to ignore them, to pretend they aren’t there, to insist that you should feel or do feel different than you are actually feeling.

The feelings we push away are the hard ones. Not always the painful ones, but the ones we aren’t ready to feel. The ones that threaten to take too much of us, steal too much of our control, break us too completely open to recover from.

Some feelings seem silly. They frustrate us and annoy us with their persistence. They talk over our maturity and our self-esteem, and they overshadow our logic and growth. These feelings linger and obsess over things that sting, over people who hurt us, relationships that ended, conversations we had years before. They dim the glow of the present, of the place we are in favor of admiring where we could have been.

I still find it difficult to let myself feel the way I truly feel. Sometimes I’m embarrassed, sometimes I’m frustrated, sometimes I’m exhausted and just want to feel something else for once. But the more I pretend not to feel how I feel, the more I block out thoughts that arise in my idle mind, the farther away I feel from the truth. I lose track of myself and how I’m doing because I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake.

So feel your feelings, little one. Listen to what they have to say and weed out what’s true. Take away their power by bringing them out into the open. Allow yourself the opportunity to heal by being honest with where and how you are hurting. Feel your feelings but don’t let them own you.  Feel all the feelings, even those that seem scary.

There are wonders amongst the woes and light beyond the lows. Feeling your feelings helps them cycle through, it helps you grow and learn and discover more than your fear would want you to find.

So feel your feelings, little one, and I’ll do the same.

See you soon.