But This is How I Feel - Doesn’t That Matter?
8: how my emotions work, unnecessary invalidation, the importance of mental health
Trigger Warning: talk of suicide after header “Mental Health Matters.”
This is the first time I spent most of the week on another post, but felt so passionate about another topic that I HAD to switch gears.
“It’s not me, it’s all these…emotional girls.”
Emotional Woman
Yup that’s me.
Hey people of the world— NEWS FLASH: We all have emotions! Sometimes they make sense to others and sometimes not, but it doesn’t mean they don’t matter! Your future therapist will be able to explain why all your emotions make sense for you to feel based on your life experiences up to that point.
If you tuned in last week, you saw my post on the plight of a child. I talked about our society invalidating the feelings of children because they’re smaller than you and don’t know what they’re talking about. (F*** that.) But this week, I am pointing out that we do the same thing with adults- especially women. I am sick and tired of hearing a variation of “She’s on her period, that’s why she’s emotional.” If you want me to instantly transform into a ravenous feminist, say this to me when I am sharing my feelings. I will leave that interaction sad to know that you are sexist. In general, I wish our society didn’t give everything a gender. No more expensive pink razors and cheaper blue razors. No more tiny girl shorts and pocketed boy shorts. But the worst of these is that being dramatic and emotional is painted into a pink problem and being factual and collected is painted into a blue asset. This “female condition” makes people feel they have the right to talk down to us and tell us how we should feel.
Right now, the world we live in expects us to hold things in for the comfort of others— which seems to work until we combust, actually giving us something to apologize for. If we had a healthy relationship with sharing and acknowledging feelings, we would all live in a happier reality where the norm wasn’t apologizing for trauma-dumping on whoever triggered you into exploding. Thankfully, therapy is becoming more socially acceptable among younger generations. I was even hanging with Z and Kimchi just the other night, swapping therapy breakthroughs—all genders welcome! But step out of therapy and being called emotional is negative.
If you’re not hearing this from me already: Men are not being served by this system either. Sure, their perspective is never dismissed as emotional, but they are limited to the emotions they are allowed to present socially while still maintaining the respect and authority of other men. Men are allowed to be angry because it is seen as justice-oriented. When a man is angry, they start a war and make history. When a woman is angry, they call her hysterical. When a woman is sad, she is just emotional. But when a man is sad, he’s pathetic and weak…he’s “acting like a girl.” None of us benefit from the current societal views on emotions or the expectations of gender.
“Is it a crime? Am I not hot when I'm in my feelings?”
Quick Note—If you saw the Barbie movie and thought it was one of the following:
too pink and stupid
anti-men
a movie just for girls
—YOU MISSED THE POINT. Go see it again. My brain would explode if I had to explain this again…but maybe it’ll be a future post. MAYBE.
What My Emotions Are Like
When I hear other women apologize for being hormonal or people in general apologizing for saying things they didn’t mean, I find myself confused.
Do women really feel like they are out of control during certain points in their cycles or has society told us our emotions matter less when we’re in a sensitive headspace?
Do people everywhere say things they don’t mean when they’re upset? Is that from holding emotions in and not understanding them when they emerge or from not taking the time to think before you say something?
For me, being “emotional” is me being myself. I am passionate and very much understand how I feel most of the time. I enjoy being all up in my emotions and I don’t know how not to be. Maybe this part isn’t relatable to most because I’m an Enneagram 4 but, as someone who values words of affirmation and thinks of language as a craft, I can’t imagine what chaos my world would be if I went around spouting shit I didn’t even mean! Like, why would I do that? No one would ever believe me when something meant a lot to me and I was passionate about it. And they still don’t. I hate the assumption that I am just hormonal or overtired that day and actually don’t mean anything I am saying. I do tend to spill out lots of words, but I only spill my truth. And I would hope everyone who knows me and has gone to lunch with me once would know that but….
“The more I think, the more it eats me up inside. The more I think, it kinda hurts to hide what I wanna say. Damn, I guess I thought you were cooler.”
Do you not believe me?
This is a feeling of hopelessness I don’t ever want to make anyone feel.“Oh, honey, you’re just being emotional.” No human being deserves to be talked down to like this. A fire roars in my chest when I hear this phrase. The current reality of my life is this invalidation. It makes me want to scream. How can so many adult people I know and spend so much time with invalidate my feelings in a 2 weeks span?
Because everyone— no matter the age or gender or enneagram type— has been taught that emotions matter less than reality instead of accepting that emotions are integral to our reality.
Everyone has a different reaction to it. I know that I tend to over-identify with my feelings (which I am working on), but I was made this way by other people using my hurt emotions as proof of other labels they wanted to attach to me.
Immature.
Unstable.
Naive.
So many words, I could drown in them. So many words, I have drowned in them. So many cassette tapes stuck in the radio, repeating their haunting melodies of labels and judgements that have been placed on me throughout my life, making every step I take shakier wherever I go. I long to discover my real identity. I long to be understood. I long to feel special.
“There are times when I don’t like myself. I believe all the things that they say about me.”
Mental Health Matters
When someone is depressed, people blame them for it. Choose to be happy, they say. Look on the bright side!
When someone has cancer, people obviously don’t blame them for it. Keep up the fight, they say. We’re here to help if you need us!
Mental health matters as much as physical health. I would maybe even argue it matters more. There’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score on my list to read because it tells how your body is affected by all of the emotional traumas you experience. There are people out there with chronic pain and no answers why and I can’t help but think that the answers lie in mental health research. Perhaps people are unaware of the issue or doctors haven’t gotten the funding to find what they need. But I don’t think the issue is being unaware of the importance of mental health, it’s denying the importance. Many people have no means to understand mental health. And when I try to explain it to someone you has no experience with it, nothing I say will get through to them. They simply cannot even fathom a perspective that isn’t their own.
People who struggle with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts can’t just CHOOSE not to have them. For some people, it’s not simple or easy or even possible to choose to be happy. A friend of mine I’ll call Petal has no concept of suicidal thoughts (lucky her). After she lost a friend to suicide, her view of this person was suddenly tinted.
“I wish I would have been there to distract them.”
“Why would they do this to their family?”
“Maybe they weren’t as close to God as I thought.”
I have honestly been struggling with this post. To clarify, I have not attempted, I have only experienced suicidal ideation. I don’t want to come across as insensitive to those who have attempted or have lost a loved one, or share too much of business that isn’t mine. But as someone who has struggled and can empathize, I must talk about how unseen it made me feel, especially on behalf of those no longer here to explain for themselves. For me, even saying “they took their own life” or “they committed suicide” makes it seem like they were of clear mind and had real choice in the matter. It is not this simple. Mental illness is just that—illness. We will phrase someone dying of cancer as them “losing their battle” to cancer. Can we start saying what truly is? If someone dies by suicide, they have lost their battle with mental illness.
This all plays into the idea that people don’t believe the reality of people’s emotions. Perhaps it was a spur of the moment decision, but perhaps it was not. Only speaking from my own experience, over the span of a few months, I felt myself detach from my own emotions. I didn’t feel like a person anymore and felt like I was slowly losing the possibility of any other outcome. I can only imagine that once someone is truly in that state of mind, real thoughts of attempting or planning suicide are not easy or possible to be distracted from. Suicide should not be made out to be a dramatic reaction to fleeting feelings. This needs to be understood. And all of this is obviously not to glorify the act as right or correct or good, but to shed light on the longtime struggles and depth of pain throughout someone’s life that can lead to someone believing the worst of themselves.
There is such shame and invalidation surrounding feelings that are uncomfortable for others to sit in. Our society is obsessed with being happy to the point that we feel comfortable ignoring problems and sweeping them under the rug to keep up the facade of happiness. What if we took the time to actually clean up and sort through the messes of our past? These deep feelings and upsetting events need the gift of space to work things through. If we give ourselves and others this gift, we would be on the road to experiencing something more than happiness— true joy. But instead, we are stuck shoving feelings away until those feelings turn into solid beliefs and those beliefs are burned onto the soundtrack of our lives. And that soundtrack can change the entire trajectory of our lives.
“I ignore things and move sideways, ‘til I forget what I felt in the first place. At the end of the day I know there are worse ways to stay alive… If my engine works perfect on empty, I guess I’ll drive.”
I’m an HSP.
It’s really hard for me when someone tries to argue my emotions away or when someone misunderstands someone I empathize with. I know it’s because I am a 4, but it’s also because am a highly sensitive person. Being an HSP means I am “a neurodivergent individual who is thought to have an increased or deeper central nervous system sensitivity to physical, emotional, or social stimuli.” Over time, it has became obvious to all counselors I have worked with and they have all kindly suggested I research this term, which I am still doing. I actually felt relieved that there was an explanation for what many people have deemed as “too sensitive” in me. With all the struggles I have faced because of it, I also gain a lot from it, as I feel more in-tune with emotions (mine and others) than many people around me seem to.
I just want there to be more understanding in ourselves and others. Many tools are available to help, like therapy and the enneagram, but the tool essential to understanding others is empathy. Not everyone thinks the same. Not everyone has or will experience what you have experienced in life. We can fight about it and “agree to disagree” until our relationships collapse or we can meet each other where we are at as imperfect humans all trying our best.
“This brilliant light is brighter than we’ve known without our darkness to prove it so.”
Whoops, I had to make some edits to content. Being a mom and a blogger be like....🙈
this is beautiful