5.13.22 // Feeling My Feelings

I haven't been great at feeling my feelings lately.
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It's an old habit I thought I shook in recent years, but my habits have a way of creeping back in if I'm not paying attention.
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For me, the habit of not feeling my feelings looks like stuffing emotions down, logic-ing myself, overanalyzing my thoughts, and justifying why I "shouldn't" feel this way or that.
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In short, I invalidate my own experience...
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I tell myself my feelings don't make sense or that someone else's experience is more important than my own.
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It's extremely detrimental to my own well-being and honestly, to those around me too, because I don't show up as myself. I show up as the "shoulded" version of me. Meanwhile, my real self is held captive by the tangled ropes of expectations I restrict myself to.
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Usually, I untangle the ropes and free myself by slowing down and giving myself time to process, but in the past few weeks, I had slipped into the tangled ropes, keeping myself in a version of me that really wasn't my true self.
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It took a conversation with a friend before I realized I wasn't feeling my feelings around a couple of different things that had happened in the last few weeks. And when I finally started to let myself think about the events that had transpired the emotions came flooding in slow at first then a tidal wave of the deep, dark, and heavy. Heavy yet cathartic.
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The friend stayed on the phone with me for three hours as I rambled and tried to logic away my feelings, before finally letting myself be washed away by the tidal wave.
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But, I changed in those moments. I felt my body again, I felt like myself again. I felt whole again even though the feelings were heavy and sad.

I didn't realize how far I had drifted from my being. I wouldn't let myself feel the very feelings and emotions floating through my body. I chose to invalidate myself and let others do the same.