Feelings: Apparently a Good Thing

Let's talk about our feelings today. How does that make you feel?

Now, if you know me, and I assume (potentially incorrectly) that if you are reading my blog you do, you will recognize that feelings and Matt are not generally two topics that intersect frequently. I have made a long and storied career out of keeping things to myself and carrying on with life. Yes, I have feelings, but I have become very good at not showing or sharing them. If you ask me how I am doing, the answer will probably be that "I'm fine." Hopefully we all recognize this is a Southern Fine, and can cover all feelings from terrible to fantastic. It is used because, quite frankly, you probably don't actually care, you're just being polite. I accept that and embrace it. I think the world could stand for more politeness.

The inevitable consequence of never opening up about my feelings is that quite rapidly the number of people one feels comfortable talking about feelings with decreases to just two people: My inner critic and my mother. My inner critic is rarely super pleasant, and most of the time he just tells me to man up. Valid. He has a point most of the time. My mother is fantastic, and I will be discussing my feelings with her later today.

Now, I could easily take this forum and use it to openly express my feelings, but like I said, I am extremely uncomfortable with that. So instead I will speak in generalities about feelings themselves instead of my personal feelings.

I have worked harder than many to control my feelings. But I will say, and I have learned this recently, that just letting yourself feel deeply is phenomenally liberating. There is something magnificently human about allowing those feelings to wash over and through you. And once they have run their course you are free and clean. 

Maybe it's the world we live in, but for some reason we have developed a culture of selective emotional expression. Everyone has to be happy all the time, or at least act like it. We start building dams, bottlenecking our emotions until they reach unhealthy levels, and then when they start spilling over the walls we have erected we scramble to build the dams higher, stronger, thicker.

The problem with dams is that eventually you are flooding a lot of land behind the dam that you could have been using for something else, like housing, or farming, or sheep grazing (And yes, we are still in the metaphor, but this is also true in real life). Emotional dams are dangerous. However, the far extreme is also dangerous, that of the emotional swamp where we just let certain emotions soak into everything, and we just wallow in them.

I think that the best thing to do is to just feel. If you feel sad, then let yourself feel sad for an appropriate amount of time and then carry on. Trying to smile through everything won't make you a happy person. Trying to laugh off disappointment or defeat won't really bring you joy. But allowing yourself to descend into the valley will also let you climb up the mountain. I don't think God gave us the full spectrum of human emotion and experience so that we could ignore or suppress bits and pieces of it. And let's face the facts; sometimes you just need a good cry.