To Feel or Not To Feel?

or maybe both? a poem

It’s important to feel your feelings, a lesson I had to learn as I stuffed my scheduled with work, work, work and more work until I had no time or energy left to think about the things that happened to me that day,

a distraction strategy that I thought worked until those emotions, that stress, those stress hormones raged strong through my body and screamed out physically when less salient symptoms were ignored in favour of doing more.

It’s important to feel your feelings but to swing from ignoring to only feeling can also be too heavy.

You cannot go from lifting 1 lb to 100lbs in a day; and not being able to lift 100lbs is not shame to hold;

yet sometimes we shame others especially others in seeking help for not being able to perfectly DO emotions, HOLD emotions, HAVE emotions in ways they’ve never been allowed to before, forcing shame on someone who wants to be different, and simply needs to be guided in the right direction with the right light.

It’s important to feel your feelings, and it’s okay to not feel it all the time.

I can make space to listen to those feelings and understand what’s going on learn what needs I still need to fill; allowing emotions to inform what my actions might be

but I can also do the opposite, instead of reactionary self-care, instead of acting only after my body screams out,

I can pre-emptively build a space to build joy and creativity into my day.

Inviting Jennifer Leth | Raffaella Ferretti | Zachary Burg| Nada Chehade | Anthi Psomiadou | Hardly Timepass | Zach Klebaner | Penofgold| Medomfo Owusu | if you’re up to it and anyone else interested to smash that writer’s block, join in on this tiny challenge and write a response, wherever it takes you!

What are your thoughts about this post? It says:

True: It’s important to feel your feelings.

Also true: It’s okay to not feel all your feelings all the time.

Submit it to The Brain is a Noodle or be sure to tag me in your response if you publish elsewhere, so I can read it and share it with the world!

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Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and this was another piece that really helped me grow and manage my emotions in a way that was comfortable and that made sense to me. This one really fits into the good old wisdom of balancing between two things, and to me, this is an example where balancing exactly in the middle has worked quite well. Love myself some symmetry, especially when considering abstract things that are usually messy and complex!

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳

^ by Earl Grey Sea