Tell Me I’m Not Alone In This…

I have a confession: I deeply dislike my feelings and I’m not very good at feeling them. I realize this is not actually a confession because there’s nothing wrong with it, but feels like it because most female writers seem to bask in their feelings—digging into them with gleeful agony, reveling in every last drop of emotion, pulling their best work from the depths of despair. As someone more comfortable with my thoughts than my feelings, all of it sounds like a nightmare to me.

Over the last five years, I’ve done my best to befriend my feelings, but we’re honestly still more like frenemies. I begrudgingly use the tools and practices I know help me process my emotions (meditation and exercise are the most helpful) but if I miss a few days, if I take in too much bad news, or if something stirs up a lot of negative emotions, I feel myself start to slip into a slump.

For me, progress means that I can now see the feelings coming and generally recognize them for what they are. This is a vast improvement from the decades where I responded to any feeling by skipping over it and going straight to the emotion I’m most comfortable with—anger. 

But once my emotions arrive, I get a little squirrely about what to do with them. I’m told I’m supposed to just feel them? UGH. But the thing is (and I realize this makes me sound emotionally stunted) sitting with my feelings is truthfully really difficult for me. It’s much more natural for me to “think” my feelings, so the process of actually feeling them is like trying to speak a foreign language I’m not very good at—lots of stops and starts, confusion, and an overwhelming desire to just resort to my first language.

This week, I received some heartbreakingly tragic news that, in addition to the general tragedy of the daily news, has me spinning. I probably just need to sit down and cry about it, but I’m resisting that because I’m afraid if feel the full heartbreak of it all my chest might actually rip open and I’ll die. 

Surely I am not alone in this?! Where are my fellow enneagram 8’s (Or 3’s? Or 7’s?) or my fellow “Thinkers” on the Meyers Briggs? And does anyone else tend to feel their feelings physically? Llike… when you feel sad your body actually hurts? This is a thing… I’m sure of it.

Or maybe this is all incredibly weird and I just need to face the fact that I’m an anomaly. 

Either way, I want to be clear: This is not an apology. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a thinker or struggling to process my emotions in this way. I just wanted to share the fact that this is how I’m wired because there’s often a disconnect between how I experience my feelings and how so many of the writers I admire seem to experience theirs… especially the women.

And I guess I hoped there might be others who share that disconnect. If not, that’s cool. I’ll just carry on.

But if this resonates with you, let me ask you two questions: 1) How do you cope with this struggle? What works for you? 2) Got any tips about how to grow in this area? 

Or, alternatively, if you just want/need to be mad about something… I’m always your gal for that.