2:20pm // unedited
I think it’s absurd the number of things people feel love should be able to make you do.
I see love as having a depth of good feelings towards and with a person. You feel good with them, you feel good about them, and you feel good when they feel good. This is what I experience at least. gooood feelings.
I think too many of us spend too much time running away from not feeling good. Running away here is active for me, it’s not just that people don’t enjoy not feeling good, it’s that people are so afraid of not feeling good, that they do everything possible to avoid experiencing anything that doesn’t feel good. They actively run. They use resources, time, and energy, to actively run. I remember doing this. I feel the pull as well to not feel anything unpleasant. anything uncomfortable. or awkward. I also don’t want to feel unhappy. abandoned. angry. afraid. jealous. ashamed. disappointed. teary. but it’s too much life being spent running away and preparing to run away from these sensations.
I learnt once from a video — that we are actually never really successful at truly running away, that what happens instead is this; by not accepting the full experience of the emotion and not letting it complete its journey through you, down to the very last ripples of the sensation, you trap the energy of the emotion somewhere in your body. Something that was supposed to pass through and leave now gets caught up in you — while unaddressed. They even mentioned that it can make you fall sick. like woh. I hate falling sick. It seems simpler to just feel and process and let my body run through the course of what I feel and process.
This episode’s arc has given me a more grounded understanding of how much I am in control and how much I am also not in control. While I am not in control of the plot of life, not knowing what will happen around me and to me even within the next 5 minutes, I am in full control of the threads I am holding. We are all sewing in the huge fabric of life. So when I feel angry — it only makes sense for me to feel it. The sensations are evidence that we are alive. That when a thing rubs us the wrong or right way we can react. We are not dead skins.
In feeling, I get to really understand who I am now, what I feel, what makes me feel how I feel, and what this means about how I perceive the conditions or people that I am having this sensation in response to. This part’s really important for me — that I don’t forget that I am the one having a response. And also that this response is communication to me alone first, since it is happening in a body that I inhabit alone. and while I am in control of so much, I am not in control of creating these sensations, these reactions we call emotions. but I can still observe them when they visit, probe at them, allow them be, or take action in response to them. I am in control of so much.
This learning arc is also forcing me to notice where I often transfer ownership of my emotions — even when no one else knows about them. But since understanding — that part of the plot of life is that I am living it, and actively writing it through what I choose to do about the things that happen — since embracing the emotions in the plot and the actions I take as a result, I see that these are all pieces of a fresh new puzzle and I get to figure out wherever they truly fit.
Since understanding this, it’s so much more difficult to say to people — this thing you did made me feel this way. or rather, it’s difficult to say some variation of that to people without feeling the urge to reassure them that I only want to express what I feel, and not necessarily that they need to change a thing they are doing, unless they are directly doing it to me (thus making their action part of the direct cause of what I am going through). Like if I say to a friend “I’m not happy that I couldn’t share the plate of jollof with you and was very jealous seeing you eat the fried rice with Ama instead”, It can’t be that I mean, “Even though I know you wanted to eat fried rice instead of jollof and I wanted the reverse, I thought you would have ignored that and put up with just eating the jollof so I could feel good”. It is even less likely that I would mean, “I know you maliciously ate that plate of fried rice with Ama, I know you did it just to make me jealous.” I can maybe mean, “I just need to let you know these sensations passed through my body when this happened”, but even then, for what purpose? Expression sometimes, transparency maybe, but for whose benefit really? There’s so many different examples of interpersonal scenarios where I cycle through these patterns while trying to make sure I remain dynamic, present and autonomous. sometimes someone else is directly doing something that I intend to ask them to take responsibility for, but even then I still need to investigate what I feel first. I’m starting to probe this process, more and more.
The result is I’ve been making firmer decisions with many many relationships these past few weeks. it’s really absurd the number of things people feel love should make you do.
coercion, manipulation and unnecessary compromise always raise my suspicions, and set me on guard. I’m certain you’re likely to feel good when you are with the people you love. You feel good, when they feel good within and with their own lives. Their friends, family, work, and entire journey, you just want it to be good for them. this makes you feel good too. This is love’s result.