I’ve been feeling very emotional of late. I’m not sure why. It catches me unawares at the most random of times, and at the most arbitrary of things. Saturday, for example, I almost cried when my husband pointed out a duck emerging from the water. It was just a normal duck, doing it’s thing, but it had me rooted to the spot, my chest clogged with emotion. The other week I stopped dead to marvel at the beauty of a lake; this despite the fact that it is one I have seen a thousand times before. Our walks are taking a lot longer than they used to.
Emotional = vulnerable
Just this morning, emotion threatened to overwhelm me, and I was only doing the school run. My daughter and I were singing along to an old playlist that I favoured when she was small and it provided a rare connection. She wasn’t telling me that I was singing off key (“It was hard Mum”, she told me when I pointed this out). She wasn’t ignoring me in favour of her phone. Instead, we laughed together as we got the words wrong to Bonnie Tyler’s Total eclipse of the heart. My heart was full.
Growing up, I didn’t feel comfortable showing emotion. As a martial artist, tears were a weakness that I couldn’t afford. Instead, if I was hurt, I buried that emotion and got back out there. That emotion equals weakness, is a message that was reinforced as I got older. Women who cried were deemed hysterical or, if being kind, fragile. Those who showed anger or annoyance, labelled dramatic or difficult. I wanted to be seen as easy-going, I wanted to be liked, and so, I tried to keep my emotions in check.
Of course, this is an impossibility and so they exploded out of me in a myriad of ways. As a result, I could be moody, argumentative, opinionated and childish. But, I rarely cried. That would expose a vulnerability outside of my comfort zone. Instead I lived with a constant heaviness in the pit of my stomach, where all of my unspent emotion seemed to live.
But why?
Maybe it’s an age thing? Perhaps now, I am more confident in myself and so I have been rewarded with an emotional freedom of sorts. It could be the yoga. They say that we store emotion in our hips and while in frog pose, I can feel them climbing up my throat looking for release. Or the writing, which is allowing me a greater understanding of all of this. It could be that the HRT I have been taking for the perimenopause has kicked in. I know for a few years before my diagnosis, I didn’t feel very much at all. I saw the world in black and white and felt like a greyer, denser version of my previous self. Now, I see in high definition, multicolour, and feel more myself than I ever have.
When my brother-in-law Mark was ill, he transformed the way he lived his life. Before, as a self-confessed workaholic, he existed firmly in the rat race. Immediately after his diagnosis, however, he saw the folly in that. He saw, with clarity, that the magic is in the little things: walking his dog, fishing with his son, laughing with his wife. In the world around him, he saw only beauty, he existed in a state of constant awe. This, by all accounts, is common to those who are dying. I suppose because there is a newfound appreciation of what we have to lose. My sister and I often wonder how we can achieve this state without the need for a life-changing shock.
Emotional freedom
I am getting there. It is a state that I drift in an out of. Of course, I still have to live in a world that is far from perfect and that can get me down. Sometimes all I can see is the homelessness, the seemingly endless wars, the erosion of women’s rights. Or more close to home, the traffic jams, the daily overwhelm and a kid who won’t go to bed when I tell her to. But more and more, I am seeing the magic. The awe when I see a tree that has lived hundreds of years. The emergence of bright yellow daffodils, signalling that spring is around the corner. That sunrise that painted the sky in vibrant reds, taking my breath away.
I like it, being able to feel everything. It is giving me a greater appreciation of my life and the people in it. I’m not sure that my husband and daughter agree, because, well .. it’s making me a bit clingy. I keep feeling the need to hug them, to tell them I love them. In response, they bat me away like a nuisance pest. I don’t care, I do it anyway.
It goes deeper than this though. It is giving me a greater compassion for other people too. I’d almost go so far as to say that it is allowing me to feel love for everyone (well not everyone … there are a few people I draw the line at).
I feel like my heart has been cracked open. But rather than feeling vulnerable, I feel free. I want to feel everything. Isn’t that what we are here for?
