“I let myself feel sad.”

I have always been very emotional.

Wait. Scratch that.

I have always been told that I am very emotional.

Note that difference?

Despite my mom pointing out that I was not the child who had the frequent temper tantrums, it was always stated that I had some big feelings. “Oh, there’s Lauren, having feelings again.” As soon as I was more conscious of it, I started trying to hide my feelings. I took them, folded them up, and stuck them somewhere inside of myself to open again when I was alone. Maybe this was why I was so angsty – because I couldn’t express my emotions. If you were to pick up my journals from my teenage years, you’d see all of those emotions laid out for no one to see. A little over a year ago, I went through my journals and while I cringed a lot, I also felt a pain in my chest. I had to take my arms and wrap them around myself in an attempt to hold Young Lauren and tell her that it’s going to be okay. I’ve done a lot of work (much of it involving holding Young Lauren) to unravel the mess of emotions I tucked so far into myself. The emotions I thought I fully let out while I was alone, in my journals. But that was simply the tip of the iceberg. Those were the emotions that were easy to pour out while writing. Everything else, everything harder, was shoved under the water, ready to destroy anything that hit it.

When I have big feelings, I get frustrated. And when I get frustrated, I cry.

It is the most annoying thing in the entire universe.

Here I am just having a fucking feeling because I spilled my tea and I’m trying to convince myself that it’s fucking fine and I’m fucking fine and jesus christ why do I have to be so fucking emotional all the time everyone else seems to be absolutely fine just having a basic fucking day but here I am getting upset because I spilled tea all over my desk and I have like 5 meetings today and when am I going to clean this up because I can’t possibly be 5 minutes late to any of these meetings because that is so fucking unprofessional and people might start thinking that I’m not good at my job but maybe I’m not actually good at my job and this is all a farce and now I’m fucking crying for no reason other than I spilled some hot water on my desk and wow Lauren you’re a fucking giant baby who’s crying over fucking NOTHING how do I even have friends why is someone married to me ugh why can’t I stop crying…

You get the picture.

It doesn’t happen as much anymore, but somedays are worse than others. Somedays I’m the camel who just had that minuscule last straw of hay drop on its back causing my back to break under the weight of everything. I still bottle things up and let myself burn out. I stress and worry about every single thing (just see my above worry spiral) but I don’t do it daily. I wait until I can’t wait anymore and then I blow up and can be found in a heaping mess on the floor, waiting for all the emotions to stream out of me like a damn that broke.

In January, I read the book Cleopatra and Frankenstein and it had a lot of wonderful quotes that made me feel things. This one hit me:

“What do you do to not feel sad?”
“I let myself feel sad”

It feels simple. Just let yourself feel what you’re feeling. Address it. Thank it. And figure out where to go from there. A simple spilled tea can turn into:

1. Ugh. I knew that would happen. I’m rushing. I need to take a breath before I move to the next step.
2. If I take the time to clean it up, I’m going to be late to this meeting. If I don’t clean it now, it’ll soak into/ruin something.
3. Okay. I’m going to clean this up and be late to this meeting. Let me message someone quickly and let them know (no apologies**).
4. Clean up the mess.
5. Join the meeting late and thank the person (or persons) for waiting (no apologies**)
6. Crisis has been averted (except now I need to make more tea lol)

**I note “no apologies” here because I’m trying to move away from saying “sorry” for literally every single little thing. Instead of saying, “Hey, sorry, I’m going to be 5 minutes late”, I can say “Hey, I am going to be 5 minutes late”. Instead of saying, “Sorry you had to wait”, I can say “Thanks so much for waiting – I spilled my tea everywhere and had to clean it up real quick.” I am a human being.**

Most accidents happen because you’re rushing. When I sliced off part of my finger in a kitchen accident, I wasn’t thinking about slicing the potatoes. I was thinking about how long this’ll take to bake and I’m already running behind and I need to be quiet cause mom is taking a nap since she’s been at the hospice with Thea for weeks and weeks and this is her only chance to nap and right now my cousins are with Thea because she’s dying and am I going to see her again before she dies? And then I sliced off part of my finger and visited the ER for the first time for myself which meant my mom most certainly did not get to have that nap that she had desperately needed in the first place and those potatoes were absolutely not baked because we threw everything (including the sliver of finger) away. All this because I was stressed the potatoes wouldn’t be “done in time”. In time for what? People would eat it when it’s done and if they didn’t, I was going to eat potatoes for a week. Who cares?

I take a breath.

I take a lot of breaths. And sometimes I tear up at the most unexpected times and I let those tears happen because holding them back causes a spiral of anxiety. I may still have 9 fingers to slice into but I’d prefer to avoid that level of “not taking time to take a breath”.

So this is my mantra: Slow down. Breathe. Allow yourself to sit with your feelings. Breathe again. It’s going to be okay.