Becoming, Lucy

Is it normal to know you’re suppressing your emotions and being unable to stop?

I know when I’m intellectualising. I know when I’m masking. I know when I’m making myself smaller and staying quiet.

I almost understand why.

So why can’t I stop? They say awareness is the first step… Yet I feel like I’ve been stood at this checkpoint for a lifetime.

I feel lost. Or rather I’m unable to name my emotions. 

I have this static in my chest but I can’t seem to tune into the frequency. 

I can’t name what is going on inside me. It all feels a bit much. Something I can’t understand. I think it’s a complex mix of emotions and there are so many, I can’t get my head around them. 

Maybe my issue is I’m trying to understand them. I’m using my brain rather than actually feeling. 

I’m good at that, throwing understanding at them. Because if I can understand, I can fix it, right?

I’m still trying to figure out if I learned that behaviour – to understand rather than feel – part of me wants to say it’s just who I am. Because I am one of those people that always asks ‘why?’ Whether it’s about how we were made, someone’s opinion, or my own emotions; it doesn’t matter what it is, I will ask why because I am endlessly curious.

Though, I think I may be using curiosity as an excuse for myself. But I resent that idea because curiosity has allowed me to wonder – it has led me into rabbit holes about many topics as well as helping me understand people with compassion rather than judgement.

However, there is another part of me that wonders if asking why I feel a certain way is a behaviour I learned. There is definitely evidence to suggest it was. Therapy helps but it doesn’t ease my own self-blame. Somewhere along the way, I stopped using curiosity as a form of connection and started using it as a form of armour.

I do know, emotions aren’t there to be fixed. They’re there to be felt and to help us understand ourselves and what boundary has been crossed. At least the ‘negative’ ones are. I think. Yet even with all this ’emotional intelligence’, I don’t know how to feel. I’ve had a lot of emotional awakenings (yes, that’s what I’m calling them) recently. 

I’m unsure if I’m numb or content because I suppressed my ‘negative’ emotions for so long that my nervous system also suppressed the ‘positive’ ones. 

I don’t know how to show or talk about my emotions because I’ve always felt guilty and a burden for doing so to someone else. 

A friend reminded me that humans were never meant to do life alone. We are naturally ‘social’ beings. We prefer a tribe. We need a tribe. Biologically speaking. And I know this. I know I’m not meant to hold it all alone. But I’ve been tuned out of my own emotions for so long that I have no idea how to express them. Everything ends in tears. And those tears feel like a failure. 

I’m so conscious of everything I do. I know when I’m intellectualising. I know when I suppress. I know when I stay quiet. I know when I’m masking. So why can’t I turn any of it off? 

Is it because I don’t feel safe? Am I too scared? Do I not know how? 

Surely if I know I’m doing something, I should be able to just stop? Because I end up hating myself for it, for not stopping. 

I’m so fed up of it all. Of myself. 

I’ve spent forever and a day trying to fix myself. I’ve been the patient whilst also being the surgeon to myself and trying to fix everything ‘wrong’ with me.

And it has cost me. Being the surgeon of my own self has cost me my own trust. I cannot trust myself to be able to feel safely. I can’t trust myself to not stay in the pits of despair, grief, sadness, and anger. I can’t trust myself to be able to accept comfort. To be able to be seen.

The surgeon made sure I knew how to dissect a feeling, but I can no longer dance with one; whether it’s a positive or negative feeling. Show me joy and I will be unable to feel it, instead I will analyse it and figure out why I feel that joy, and then why I should not feel it. If I was told to simply feel it, feel the joy, I would be lost.

I’m trying so hard not to be the surgeon any longer but I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to just feel it all. I don’t know how to just lay there and accept I’m in pain. 

My brain really said, “survive, survive, survive.” 

There is fear behind it all. If I was to stop being the surgeon for just a moment, if I put down the scalpel, and allowed myself to soften… What would be left? What would remain of me? Would I cry sooner? Would I still listen to the same music? Would I be able to feel everything without drowning? Without the highs feeling like the highest highs and lows feeling like the lowest lows?

I’ve lived in survival for so long that I don’t know where survival ends and I begin.

Maybe it isn’t about stopping the surgeon completely. Maybe I just need to ask the surgical part of me to slow down. I need to allow myself to witness the emotion.

I tried sitting with myself. I tried just feeling. I put my hand on my chest, I tried to say what I was feeling but I physically recoiled. I threw my hand away, I felt sick and made my hands busy instead. 

It was uncomfortable. And that’s a really horrible thing to admit. I’m that incapable of feeling.

What? No.

I’m afraid of feeling.

I can’t feel anything until the weight is too much, until the dam breaks and the tears fall. Until I’m suffocating on my own air. On my own emotions. 

But I didn’t run. I have to remind myself of that. Sure, I couldn’t allow myself to feel the emotion, to name it. But I fidgeted and felt uncomfortable for another 10-30 seconds and then I picked up my phone and begun writing this into my notes app. I poured this out. 

And sure, I’m still trying to be the surgeon. I’m still sat here trying to fix it, to understand, to apply logic and maybe even find excuses (or is that guilt talking?). 

But I’m learning. Something. I’m not sure what I’m learning. But it is something. 

I think. I hope.