The Time I Was Challenged To Confront My Feelings
And I couldn’t just dance it off anymore.
This past week, my roommate left for home while I stayed back in our 900 sq. ft apartment with nowhere to go. I was stripped away from the luxury of any human interaction. I felt alone.
I realized that everything I know and partake in the external world to define my identity and to distract me from how I feel inside was no longer a source I could rely on.
So I decided to use this time away from everyone and everything, to catch myself in stillness — the moment when all those other stimuli outside of me weren’t bombarding me anymore.
This moment was quite unnerving because I began to realize that most of my happiness was created from experiences outside of me. For example, from challenges and excitement of traveling to unknown places and meeting someone special, that gave me momentary, fleeting joy.
Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t miserable or sad without these external stimuli influencing me but they definitely played a huge role in helping me attain a brief state of happiness.
When we achieve a promotion, make new friends, or get in a new relationship, we experience a burst of euphoria. This is the idea of conditioned happiness.
Instead what I’m describing here is our tendency to alter major life events and return to the base level of happiness — The feeling where we feel unsettled being in one place for too long, and everything starts to feel repetitive and monotonous. We feel something’s not right, and we find ourselves desperately seeking that next high.
One “positive” thing the pandemic has done for me, and possibly a few others, is it’s forced us to face our emotions head-on. It’s taken away our natural tendency to stay busy to keep unwanted emotions at bay. Think about it: When we go through a breakup, we keep ourselves busy doing things that repress off those old, deep emotions, sweeping them under that rug.
Take it from my experience for someone who has recently gone through a breakup during the lockdown, not being able to go out and dance my sadness away is one of the most difficult things I’ve done. I know, I’m being a bit dramatic, but you get the gist.
In the past, I would’ve done everything in my power to distract myself from feeling the pain of second-guessing myself or the emptiness from not being to see someone that was a part of my daily routine. And since these new experiences produce endless emotions, masking away your true feelings, it becomes a good distraction. And this act even works for a while.
I want to introduce the concept I learned from Joe Dispenza in his book, “Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself” that helped me process my emotions and allowed me to somewhat close what he calls “the gap.”
The gap is the emptiness we feel when how we appear on the outside is not how we feel on the inside.
“When we memorize addictive emotional states such as guilt, shame, anger, fear, anxiety, judgment, depression, self-importance, or hatred, we develop a gap between the way we appear vs the way we really are. The former is how we want other people to see us. The latter is our state of being when we are not interacting with all of the different experiences, diverse things, and assorted people at various times and places in our lives. If we sit long enough without doing anything, we begin to feel something. That something is who we really are.” — Dr. Joe Dispenza
Dr. Dispenza explains that we wear various emotions, which we memorize based on our past experiences, and over time these emotions form our identity. In order to remember who we think we really are, we find comfort in recreating the same experiences and talking to the same people to reaffirm our personality and the memorized emotions.
I’ve heard a million times that happiness comes from within, but it never hit me like this before.
It was a good thing that our relationship ended (And, trust me I tried to convince myself of it every day), but I couldn’t make that feeling of emptiness go away. When someone walks out of our life, and we can no longer be around that person, the emotions created from that experience are no longer available. Soon enough, they become fleeting memories that we can’t seem to let go of.
That’s when we become dependent on external cues to reinforce our memorized emotion.
Since my past habit of running from painful emotions was no longer a source to fall back on with social distancing guidelines, I decided that I needed to close that gap and break free from the dark side.
Eliminating the gap between who we are when we’re not preoccupied with life and who we present to the world is likely the biggest challenge we all face in life. We are not even aware that we’re hiding ourselves in the shadows.
I, then, realized that it was my choice to become more self-aware and confront my feelings or return to my past habits. So I decided to come clean to myself about what I’ve been doing, how I’m thinking, how I’m feeling, and define any moments when I’m dependent on something outside of myself to change me internally.
The reason I was not able to move past our relationship, or any problems for that matter, was because I was analyzing it subjectively with my emotions involved. I was re-living moments that created the problem in the first place, which only brought up the old emotions and a reason to feel the same way.
When you try to figure out your life within the same consciousness that created it, your reality will stay the same. You will excuse yourself from making further advancements in the pursuit of changing your habits.
My recent approach has been to not let my buried feelings stay buried. I have started to become transparent when I am trapped in my timeworn mindset, habitual behaviors, and perceptions.
In the process of reflection, I’ve become aware of the importance of staying true to your inner self — The self who doesn’t need more and more validation from the outer world to make you feel better.
Moving forward, I am prepared to objectively analyze, (but not too much) my emotions and see things for what they are without allowing outside distractions to influence me.
