Is this what it means to be me?

By: Urvisa Agarwal

I never understood why I was so scared to express myself when it came to feeling certain emotions. Is it because I’m not familiar with them? I don’t think so. Is it because I never saw them as feelings that were ‘ok’ to express, so instead I just suppressed them? Why do I immediately feel the need to hide these feelings instead of expressing as well as acting on them? 

What made me afraid of these emotions was its pattern. A pattern where someone loses control when they are angry, maybe because they have been hurt, and in return they hurt people back by saying or doing things they don’t mean to. Guilt and regret are some common aftereffects of this. I realized, when I am angry, I don’t feel the need to hurt others. I never saw this as a good way to deal with it. I learnt that hurting somebody when you’re an emotional mess isn’t really the right way to go about it. Due to the stigma surrounding the expression of emotions, most of us never learnt the healthy way of expressing them. The right way to communicate my feelings and at the same time, not hurt anybody.

 I wanted time to figure it all out- time which I never got and all I ended up doing was cramming up my feelings in a small box and dumping it in a far corner of my head. But the more I felt, the more often this happened and now I’ve reached a phase where I’m just confused with whether I’m even capable of feeling the emotions in the same way as before. So now, to my surprise, my way of dealing with anger has changed; how in order to spare others feelings, I keep bottling up my emotions without even realizing the damage I am doing. My anger is now cool, blue and rather unshifting. It was never screaming rage or intense outbursts for me, but rather silent frustration that surrounded me like a black cloud. And as much as I think that this is the right way, I wish it was red and violent so that I’d burst out and be done with it once and for all.

Now all this holding back has raised one simple yet complicated question in my head- what am I supposed to do with this feeling? I noticed that some of us like to forget. The rest of us live in a state of delusion. Not realizing the horrible position we’ve put ourselves in. Some days, this anger creates an ache so bad we struggle to move. On other days, this anger makes us feel ugly and undeserving of love and instead makes us believe we deserve all of the horrible things that come our way. I know the image can be deceptive and that I might not be at my best emotional state right then to clearly understand what is going on, but it’s all I can see- an ugliness that makes me feel the need to hide my whole self away, because I haven’t worked on how to emerge from my own anger, and how to dip into peace thereafter.

But now, I have understood why I hide myself away. It is simply because sometimes I forget I haven’t done anything wrong. Sometimes I forget there’s nothing in my pockets I need to hide. Sometimes I forget that to be me is to be unseen and unheard, because I’m afraid to be seen and heard in ways I did not ask for. Sometimes I forget that to be me is to be a black body, and nothing more. I don’t want it to be one but to figure a way out feels like a Sisyphean task, at least for now and oh I hope to God that it gets easier because that is what i have been told. Again and again and again.