Fucking Feel It

I know, I’ve already sworn and I’m not even past the first line. Please don’t be turned off. Please stay with me.

When I worked in wilderness therapy a couple years ago, everyone made such a big deal about feelings. For example, you’d never answer “How are you feeling today?” with “I’m feeling good.” Because pizza is good; feelings aren’t “good.”

No, what are you feeling? What’s a specific emotion you can attach to this “good” that you feel?

Maybe it’s “content” or “joyful” or “devastated.”

At first this explanation felt obvious to me as someone all too accustomed with this world of feelings. When I was eight, I knew it was anticipation and joy that I felt coming home from school to watch Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

When I cried at little league signups, I knew it was fear.

When my dog died, sadness and despair unlike anything I’d ever endured.

When I worked with troubled youth with still-developing brains fried from drugs and alcohol, many of them couldn’t make sense of the knotted feelings inside them. Things were “good” and things were “not good,” and it’s hard to make healthy choices from the “not good” when you don’t even know what you’re feeling or why.

Stripped from technology and friends and the indoors, these teens got lots of practice processing and expressing their feelings, both to themselves and to a larger group, working in harmony and conflict.

Years removed from this wilderness experience, I’m realizing I’m not so different from these addicted teenagers. Like them, like everyone else, I also experience unpleasant feelings that I no longer want to feel. Unpleasant feelings that I want to replace with pleasant ones, no matter how false.

I’ve been feeling these unpleasant feelings in abundance lately.

Like an addicted teenager with a fried and still forming brain, I’ve fled to familiar vices to block all this feeling. To minimize the “not good” and maximize the “good.”

Pizza is good; what’s an emotion?

It’s been a year riddled with unpleasant feelings and unhealthy coping mechanisms. A retreat into a manufactured fantasy world rather than a hard confronting of reality.

Lately, though, I’ve been allowing myself to feel these unpleasant feelings. The disappointment. The despair. The fear. The regret. The frustration. The confusion. The hurt.

Feelings. I’ve allowed myself to fucking feel them.

And I’m surviving the onslaught.

Feelings are like the fog so often tucked in these Blue Ridge hills. They swirl and settle among the tree boughs and road lines. You can’t see more than a few inches beyond where the yellow lines lead.

But you follow that line through.

You round a bend.

You climb in elevation.

And soon, the fog descends.

The feelings fade.

The feelings fall.

And you continue on your way.

I’m no longer a teenager, but I am learning the basics all over again as if I were one. Learning to feel what I feel and realizing that feelings aren’t forever.

They are unpleasant. They are painful. They are devastating.

But they are not forever.

If you’re having a hard go. Let yourself feel your feelings. Really fucking feel them.

Cry. Scream. Journal. Writhe in the bedsheets for hours. Text a friend. Weep into his shoulder.

Do not stuff your feelings. Do not numb them with falsities.

Feel your feelings. Each and every not good one.

And then like a wanderer in these hills. Continue on your way.