the murky waters

I haven’t really had an opportunity to sit down and write these past few days due to some overwhelming amounts of anxiety and what not. okay, maybe not anxiety, maybe just high stress. an unimportant descriptor i suppose (or not?). I think one of the things that i struggle with as i’ve grown older, as showcased here, is learning to accept my emotional response to something as legitimate and within ‘reason.’ in this whole new world (as i like to think is slightly influenced by our generation of young people) of being open about your emotional state, it still is increasingly difficult to feel accepting of one’s individual response. and it makes sense. the majority of what we do in the world and the things that govern it are based in supposed logical reasoning. and a lot of what goes on in that logical reasoning is guided by objective measures. a food is bad for you if it has too many calories. a day is easy because you didn’t have to work. zeroes and ones. the majority of our ways of understanding the world and how we relate that to one another, with ease, is through the use of these objective, logical measures. seems easy enough?

but then the resounding issue here, is that, as humans, we also have to navigate the world of ~emotions~. for what seems to be the bulk of human history, at least in the western world (my cultural understandings are based in western values so apologies if this isn’t an all inclusive generalisation), is that emotionally guided decisions are innately less valuable. and i get it, emotions can’t be defined in black and white. no one can create a encyclopedia of emotions and how they work or what objectively causes one emotion versus the other. thankfully, we’re starting to understand that in a sense one of the most important parts of being human is our emotionally guided lives. that should be good for us as a species, right? still not sure? okay, that’s fine; i’ll keep talking.

I might have lost you a little so lets rope this back to my original opener. with that new world of emotions being ‘okay,’ we then reach this impasse of having to balance the supposed two parts of psyche and weighing what is the ‘right’ response, view, etc. of a given topic, event.. you get my point. we want to be rational, objectively minded beings. that makes shit a lot easier to explain. so naturally, often our initial response to an emotionally charged state is, ‘okay i should pat this fire out before it gets too big.’ we gaslight, manipulate, whatever you wanna call it, ourselves into thinking we need to reframe our approach to something to rid it of emotion. and i don’t think that’s necessarily a bad innate response. people have different emotional responses to different things in their lives; we can’t surely espouse our emotional view of something to another person without some imbued fear that they might appear completely dumbfounded at our response. no one wants that, so instead we push that emotion as quickly and far back down its rabbit hole as possible. phew, saved ourselves some embarrassment, i guess.

i think it is increasingly important for us as a species, society, etc. to continue to push ourselves to embrace that discomfort or embarrassment of shared emotion. tell your friend they hurt your feelings when they did something you’re writing off as ‘small and unimportant.’ now, don’t expect them to immediately respond in an apologetic way. if they didn’t originally apologise, it’s likely their emotional review of the situation was different. but, embrace the following conversation. your response was just as ‘right’ as theirs. learn from each other, have a fight, have a cry… it’s all okay. as you go into this next week, make yourself uncomfortable. tell someone how you really feel. use your emotions just as strongly as your ‘logical rational’ response. we’re all so fucking complex and its frightening, but uncertainty, fear, excitement, it’s all ‘natural.’ you’re natural. i’m natural (okay i’ll stop there with the natural this natural that because it could serve as fuel for another post about our ‘nature is good’ fallacy).

but lastly, remind yourself that finding a balance is always best. all emotion or all logical, objective measurement is not healthy. you’ll find issues trying to live your life ‘all in’ either way. i hope what i said today resonates with someone who needed these words. maybe it didn’t, but regardless my hope is all the same.

take some deep breaths this week.

peace, D.