Feeling is a Part of Experience
I didn’t grow up in a household where feeling and expressing some of your emotions was welcomed. And it wasn’t just in my household, in my personal relationships as well. Whenever i would try to explain myself it often ended up being a painful experience. So, I learned how to shut down my emotions. I wouldn’t feel any anger, sadness, or love; I wouldn’t feel anything at all. This was the worst part of my life because feeling these emotions is life. It’s a part of the experience, it’s a part of human nature.
I lived like a robot for a long time. I would pray to God for a lover who would give me all their love and for someone to whom I could give all my love. But I never learned that. I never learned how to love, I never learned how to show emotions, I never learned how to be vulnerable. Instead, I learned how to care less, how to manipulate people, how to have a “bitch face.” And everybody thought that was normal. But that was not normal. This is not normal. We are humans; we’re supposed to feel, we’re supposed to experience pain, to show our anger, and to love. Burying our emotions isn’t a part of the experience; we shouldn’t have learned that in the first place.
Sometimes, when you spend too much time with people who don’t appreciate your thoughts, who don’t care about how you feel, you learn to not care about yourself either. You start to not trust your own emotions, your instincts. You can’t decide because you don’t think you’re intelligent enough to make that decision, but that’s not true. Sometimes you’re the only person to make a decision, you need yourself for those times.
All these years, I thought I had trust issues, and this is not wrong. I did have trust issues. I still struggle with that sometimes, but that wasn’t the main problem in me. I am calling it a problem because something is wrong. I can feel it. I am dying to feel things, I am dying for a little danger, as long as it is an experience. It’s almost like I’ve been dead for a while. The main problem was, me being a teenage girl who could not let herself feel, who could not love, who could not show how in love she was, who could not tell someone how wrong it was what they did to her. I was a girl who could not face herself because it was too deep. It was always painful when she let herself feel. It was a deep hole; not a magic hole, but a dark, deep, eternal hole.
Sometimes we think it’s too much, we think that we can’t take it, and we decide to not feel it for a while. We live in a zombie mode, but there has to be a time to end this. Let’s face it, you can’t live in zombie mode forever. Deep down, you want an intimate relationship, you want to get married, you want to have kids, but you believe it’ll never happen for you. Why? Because you never learned how to understand how you really feel. You never gave yourself the opportunity because you were so scared that you preferred to feel nothing rather than experiencing the range of emotions; sometimes perfect, sometimes just good, sometimes angry or sad. We live for those moments where we see a spark among all those dark emotions, we live for magic to happen in life. It feels like magic because it comes after bad experiences, and that’s the good part.
It’s never going to be easy to get out of zombie mode. Once you’re out of it, you have to adapt to the real world. You need to remember who you were because that’s your identity, and no one else can own it but you.
You shouldn’t be scared of love because you think it’s going to go away someday. And yes, maybe it is going to go away, but you have the power to feel that pain and still stand up straight and be ready to love again. You shouldn’t choose a partner you don’t love just because you think that when you’re truly with someone you love, you’re going to get hurt. That’s love, someone is going to get hurt in the end anyways.
Show your anger, it’s okay. It’s okay to explain how you feel, it’s okay to fight sometimes. You shouldn’t avoid conflict just because you don’t want to feel negative emotions. You are not a robot; of course you’re going to feel things, of course you’re going to show how you feel, of course you’re going to be sad when somebody hurts you, of course you’re going to be mad when someone gets on your nerves. It’s fine, just be it. Being human is good, emotions are good, feeling your emotions is good. You have to teach yourself that. Making mistakes is normal, feeling ashamed is normal, feeling angry is normal because this is life, and in life, everything is normal.
Hazal Kocaoğlu
