I saw this post this morning from @heysigmund and it feels very poignant right now.
The movie Inside Out, helps us see that emotions need to co-exist and we see Joy and Sadness hanging out together in the movie. Yet it can feel very different, and when you are feeling such despair or devastation can be hard to imagine that you will ever feel any different.
When are any of us ever taught about the complexity of feelings, so then how can the lessons be passed down if they are not there to begin with? When do we learn that difficult feelings will pass, once acknowledged they will move through naturally and we feel lighter and calmer? In our Britishness, when are we told that feelings even need to be acknowledged and that its okay to do this, as oppose to pushing them away and trying to move on from them that way, to protect oneself?
Some days are amazing, and we want them to last forever and other days can feel devastatingly awful and unbearable to the point where we just want to curl up and pretend, they didn’t happen. And we manage to get through them, they sometimes leave their scars and often the ones that are the hardest, shape us, mould us, change our perspective in some way…nurture our bravery and our wisdom and prepare us for the next tough time.
Relationships in life can both heal us and harm us too, and often if we can allow it the people who are not right for us, are the ones who are our biggest teachers, teaching us what we need to do for ourselves, what boundaries we need in place, what is important to us, and what more we might need from ourselves.
One of the hard things about being human is that to live fully, we must open ourselves up to both the light and dark of life, to really love brings joy and happiness and can also mean loss and heartache. I realised in my early thirties that to find the love I really wanted, I had to take a risk and step in fully….prior to that I was tentatively standing on the outside for fear of being hurt. Yet in being on the outside I also wasn’t fully feeling the joy of love either, I was neither in nor out.
Someone dear to me reminded me yesterday, that the space taken up by loss and heartache can also exist alongside the joy and tenderness of relationships and there is room for both. Sadness, still yet perhaps with hope, courage with strength and an openness to what is coming next. Living bravely and wholeheartedly doesn’t mean getting over loss or denying the feelings that take our breath away sometimes, it means honouring both and in time moving with…rather than on…
