Some of us feel deeply. We experience life intensely. The joy, the sadness, the anger, the longing, the love. And somewhere along the way we can get the message that this is wrong. That we’re too sensitive, too emotional, too hard, too much. That we should be more like everyone else. Fill our days with routines and the dull and the mundane. Be thin, be pretty, speak nicely, dress a certain way, quieten down, organise ourselves, be happy with less. So we start trying to become something other than who we really are. Spending our days trying to fix ourselves. Trying to be better. Trying to become more productive. But in trying to micro-manage ourselves and our emotions, something inside us sort of dies.
Then we meet someone who is very similar to us, someone who meets us energetically, someone who’s living freely, loving wildly, creatively. Someone magical and we feel met, even for just a second and we come back to ourselves. What if the very things we’re not spending our lives trying to change are actually our gifts? What if, instead of trying to feel less, we channelled all that we are, just as we are, into our art, our voices, our music? Our colour, our big feelings, our rough edges, our depression, our elation.
I can attest to the pain of trying to be something other than I am, something more acceptable, more palatable. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to be pretty or polished or small. Maybe I was born to just be as I am, to feel, to scream, to sing, to dance my ass off, to hurt, to be a well of emotion. When I allow this to be, when I sit with it all, I feel whole, I feel alive. Maybe you’re the same?
There’s a song for that
Last week I woke up on my sofa to the sound of the city’s dawn chorus. So different from the dawn chorus that used to wake me up as a child in the countryside; a chorus of songbirds. The city chorus is almost demonic sounding. I typed into Google ‘dawn chorus in city’ and fantastically Thom Yorke’s song ‘Dawn Chorus’ came up. I’d never heard it before. It was perfect. And I remembered that I could write that.
This morning I was feeling a bit sad and lonely and my client sang the Carpenters’ “I Need To Be In Love”. It might sound a bit cheesy but the words are so beautiful. And I like to feel. These writers, these singers, they felt deeply. They transformed their feelings into art that touches the souls of others.
There’s a song for every feeling, for every moment. Sometimes it doesn’t make us feel better. Sometimes it makes us feel even more deeply. But perhaps that’s the point. Maybe you were also born to feel deeply? To express what is hard to express. To create art that touches human hearts.
The body
We live in a world of confusion and the truth can be found in the body. Emotions need motion, not stuckness. They need to be witnessed, heard. Our voices can express what words alone cannot. And it’s in these shared emotions that we feel the love, the human connection. That we are not on our own. And that’s valid and that’s worthy and that’s beautiful.
And perhaps that’s what you’ve been missing? Not another plan, another routine, another way of becoming a better version of yourself. But the space to actually experience the person you already are. All the contradictions, all the intensity, all the things that don’t fit neatly into the life you think you’re supposed to be living. Perhaps you need to give the person you already are a voice.
Image: Cy Twombly, Untitled VIII [Bacchus], 2005 (Flickr Creative Commons/stëve (Steve Parkinson)
