During my mom’s visit I realized something about myself. Her and me always talk a lot about how and why things happened the way they did, our reactions, feelings etc. Hobby-analyzing perhaps. What I discovered was that I have two extremes when it comes to strength and sensitivity. I’m extremely emotional/ sensitive, but also very strong / courageous / determined. Understanding this for both myself and others, haven’t been easy. Even my mom didn’t get me for a long time – she thought I lacked sensitivity when the truth was the exact opposite. In my work I’ve always heard that I’m either “like a bull” or “way too sensitive“. That I’m both became clear to me this weekend and understanding this helped a lot.
When thinking about it, these two sides are actually closer than one might think. I feel a lot all the time. I feel EVERYTHING, and I’m not afraid neither to feel or express my emotions. Some can see this as a weakness, as someone who’s very fragile, when I in fact see it as a strength. Many people push away difficult emotions, because they’re afraid of them. I believe our emotions guides us in the right direction and feeling bad isn’t bad, it’s just a clear sign that we’re not where we should be or that we haven’t accepted a certain situation as it is. Feeling a negative emotion, understanding where it’s coming from and moving away from / accepting a situation allows us to release it and LET GO. Only when we let go of what no longer serves us can we make room for new things to come into our lives. If we’ve never felt pain, we can’t know true joy. If we’ve never felt sorrow, we can’t know true happiness. If we’ve never had our hearts broken, we can’t know true love.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” – Louise Erdrich
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