Let’s burst that bubble.

I had not talked about what happened for a while. Until the other day. I shared. And it felt good. But funny enough, the moment that touched me most, remembering a moment full of love, when tears came, my friend said to me: “You don’t have to talk about this now if you don’t feel like it.” it stopped me dead. And suddenly I became quiet. Something inside me had shifted. One second I had been right there in the memory. And the next, I was looking at myself from the outside, wondering whether I should really be doing this.

For a while I became silent. Seeing that the hesitation itself was worth listening to.

Was I suddenly aware of being witnessed? In the strange vulnerability of being seen while feeling something deeply. Not just telling a story about something that happened, but actually allowing the feeling to move through the body while someone else is watching.

And then. Did her concern make me question whether my emotion was too much, too intimate, too heavy to place into the space we were sharing?
It comes back to the idea that tears should be contained. That emotions have their proper places, their proper volume, their proper timing.
I am guilty of this still. I still tend to push emotions away. Not when I am alone, but when I am with others. Better compose yourself. Constantly.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this at all.

Why else do we have hospitals full of people that learn how to feel again? Ian one of them and I met them.

How absolutely absurd this. We live in a world overflowing with reasons to feel. Yet we act as though feeling too visibly is somehow the strange thing. We watch people suffer on screens, talk about wars over dinner, scroll past tragedies between advertisements, worry about the future, carry old wounds, lose people, fall in love, experience disappointment, joy, fear, longing. And then we are expected to sit neatly in our chairs and behave as though none of it is happening inside us.

We are constantly trying to control the very thing that makes us human. We call it composure when it is simply disconnection. We call it maturity when it is fear. We call it keeping it together when something inside us is desperately asking to be allowed to fall apart for a moment.
I will not be the one screaming my anger in a mall.
Or, maybe, I will?
Maybe I should.
Maybe we would all feel lighter if we would scream. At least every once in a while. Or cry. Maybe it is madness that we are not screaming and crying. I mean. Look at the world. Everyone drifting on in their own self inflicted bubble. Self-absorbed with a past that had passed and a future that might never come. Forgetting the now. With the emotions that are present. Now. Hiding them away. For what?

So. Lets burst the bubble.

Let’s cry and kick and scream.
I go first.

Challenging my own discomfort.

Will you join me?