“Listen – are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?” — Mary Oliver
I just didn’t understand, that’s all. I thought we were meant to show up in life only smiling and happy. I thought only babies cried, stomped their feet or got scared. Once we were a little older – seven? eight? nine? – we were expected to be in full control of our emotions. I thought we were meant to be pleasant. To being pleasing.
But however much I tried, the world seemed to conspire against me. Illness, death, disruption, disappointment, tragedy, fear, hopelessness, depression, anxiety – you name it, I was tormented. What I felt most intensely, though, was shame.
Shame that depression kept me in bed day after day, unable to get up, or talk like a normal person to people who cared about me. Shame that I couldn’t shake the godawful dark cloud that followed me wherever I went. Shame that I felt only alienation. Shame that a thick wall barricaded me from the world. Shame that I couldn’t muster the energy to smile and partake in celebrations. Shame that it was so heavy. Shame that I was so numb.
Shame that I couldn’t shake my sorrow (an altogether different scenario than depression). I feared that if I opened up to it even just a crack, that I would drown, unable to cope with the tide of grief I knew was buried deep inside. I couldn’t allow myself to go there because it would mean that I’d never stop crying. I would die from the tears.
I knew what I couldn’t tolerate – awful bosses, terrible jobs, an explosive husband – but I felt shame that I couldn’t tolerate them, the way I saw other people carry on. And so the shame piled on.
I’m not kidding that I was nearly 50 before I learnt the toll this had taken on me, and how to get out of it.
Girls are often taught to shun anger. Boys are traditionally told to ridicule fear or sadness. So we grow up disassociating ourselves from them. We don’t want to experience them, and we get very uncomfortable if other people experience them in front of us. Some cultures even consider their “stiff upper lip” as a badge of honour. (It’s the same culture that normalises drinking beyond comprehension every weekend and every weekday too, surprise; that’s one handy way emotions can leak out, isn’t it?)
I now see all emotions as messages. They originate in the body. We will feel a rumbling in our stomach, the hair stand up on the back of our neck, a tremor in our voice, a beating heart. Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Years ago, in London, I was walking to the gym and saw a man ahead of me, and I had a visceral reaction: I stood alert as my breathing came thick and fast.
It took my mind many more minutes to remember who the man was: he’d been a locum GP I’d consulted once many months ago. He had been impatient when I described my excruciating pain, and had dismissively told me to take paracetamol. I only had to see a fraction of his profile before my body reacted instantaneously.
My body knows. But I had spent a lifetime dismissing my body, embarrassed by its processes and rhythms, which I tried valiantly to override with technology, bright artificial lights, overstimulating my dopamine receptors, putting one stress after another on it. I wanted to worship my mind, believing it to be far superior, stronger and able to overcome the more base needs originating in my body. Silly me.
So, I had to go back to basics.
(Side note: I’ve mentioned before that I plan to open an art school for adults who think they’re not creative; this originated from an idea for a life school that would teach adults what we should have learnt when we were much younger but society didn’t deem it necessary – dealing with our emotions was one of my top five to bring experts in to educate us all on.)
All emotions can just about be distilled into: mad, bad, sad or glad. Everything we feel is a combination, variation or differing intensities of these.
Mad is anger. Bad is fear (yes, a bit of a convenient stretch). Sad is sorrow. Glad is happiness. Depression is an extreme version of sad (though many therapists think behind depression is suppressed anger, so we can think of it as a combination of mad and sad). Anxiety is an overload of feeling bad; as is rage (mad) and euphoria (glad).
Emotions carry no judgment, despite my being judgy about them when I was younger. They’re mere signals. I’ve learnt that I have to feel them, then release them. We cannot truly let go what we don’t first hold properly.
Think of an antelope being chased; after it’s managed to escape the lion and feels safe again, the antelope shakes off the excess adrenalin then calmly goes to drink water or frolic or whatever. Children do the same when they fall and get hurt; they howl for a few minutes then get over it and go back to playing as if nothing happened.
Now imagine if we never let it out. I sometimes picture my insides as having had layer upon layer of unexpressed rage, anxiety, hurt… just building and building. No wonder I felt like I couldn’t cope. No wonder I was always running away from my body.
In Ayurveda, they say that detoxing the body will also release the old emotions that got stuck inside us (which is perhaps why any cleansing work, or even a massage by a skilled therapist has at times reduced me to a sobbing heap). Chinese Medicine even associates different organs with different emotions – kidneys is fear, liver is anger, heart is joy, spleen is anxiety, and lungs is grief.
It’s simpler to release them soon after we experience them, of course, rather than allow them to pile on. I learnt from my extraordinary therapist how to release from the body, which is where it’s all happening. For anger, I punch a pillow or scream into it. For sadness, I cry. For fear, I shake my body to release the excess adrenalin. If I’m feeling giddy with joy (it happens), I dance it out. It sounds logical because that’s what we usually do when we feel those emotions, yet, believe me, I spent far too long suppressing mine instead.
Knowing that there’s a simple way of releasing the emotions is what helped me see that I could allow myself to feel them fully in the first place. I needn’t die a death of tears, or be swallowed whole by grief. And none of it need be overly dramatic. I think it’s important to also mention being responsible for our emotions; vomiting out our rage onto others is not mature, and it’s not a useful expression of it either.
Once I've released the excess emotion, then I’m calm enough to understand why it had come up in the first place. If emotions are messages, then I’m being told that there’s something that needs my attention.
My body, like yours, really has no interest in holding onto trauma. It would much rather get on with the business of keeping me alive. But if I don’t process these errant emotions, it does store them. Indeed, in some holistic practices, it’s said that our bodies buffer our organs against our emotional traumas, and the preferred storage for anything harmful in the body – be it unprocessed emotions or toxins from our polluted world – is in fat. (Ufff, it had to be, didn’t it?)
Whether that’s true or not, I do know that a good cry or a good shake makes me feel lighter. Suppressing emotions is a burden. Wishing they would go away – all the shame I felt – doesn’t work. The only solution is to feel them, release them, then process the messages behind them.
I no longer go around with a fake smile plastered on my face as I grit my teeth. I don’t fear my emotions any more; I chase them because I know they have valuable lessons for me. Envy led me to Italy. Depression made me return to art. Grief helped me understand myself a gazillion times better. Being in pain hurts like crazy. But not understanding why it’s there hurts so much more.
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every minute of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
— Georgia O’Keefe at age 99
Recommendations
BOOK
“Always prudence and honour and duty. Elinor, where is your heart?” Two sisters, one who wears her heart on her sleeve, the other who tucks hers into her bonnet. We will love them both forever. Jane Austen’s gorgeous Sense and Sensibility makes me swoon every time.
TV
Colin From Accounts is an Australian romantic comedy done very well. I wasn’t sure about it after the first few episodes (a bit too many poo and pee jokes) but I really warmed to it. Lovely, with great characters. The lead actors are also the filmmakers.
BOOK
When I lived in Bombay, I’d see a group of senior souls meet at the park each morning for their laughing group (it’s a thing, you can look it up). I always thought this is a fantastic idea. When I want to laugh out loud, I do the next best thing: read PG Wodehouse. Yes, he’s old school but he’s hilarious. There’s my favourite Blandings series, there are countless short stories and of course, there’s the classic Jeeves and Wooster. From Carry on, Jeeves:
“Biffy, old egg,” I said, “as man to man, do you want to oil out of this thing?”
“Bertie, old cork,” said Biffy earnestly, “as one friend to another, I do.”
Thank you for writing this, articulating and analysing things I also struggle with (which really helps), for being so honest and brave and sharing your journey.