When I was young, I was under the impression that feelings were accompanied by a sense of weakness, they show how affected you are by different situations, how fragile you are, they may even be a sample of immaturity. Growing up we were told “Don’t cry, you’re not a baby”, “Don’t grumble, you are a grown up now”, “Confine your joy, nothing happened”, which was and still is wrong.
The intensity and isolation of adolescence made me realize, think in-depth, delve into, and find arguments in order to be able to defend my emotional self, all because I didn’t want to replace it with the pure logic and seriousness that in my mind adulthood brings about. The journey to this discovery taught me that feelings are perceived as dishonest. They aren’t tamed by logic, they don’t appease at the sound of the status quo, instead, they lash out and emerge during the most inappropriate, but at the same time most fitting moments.
Let’s take a look, however, at the contribution of emotions in our lives. One could say that feelings are shaped alongside our behavior because they manifest as a result of different situations, experiences, and thoughts that we encounter during the course of our lives. The weirdest but most beautiful thing is that we don’t choose what moves us, even though we control the stimuli we are exposed to, because we have developed an emotional world, an emotional behavior which responds differently to every sentiment, piece of information, and movement it receives. In physics, every action brings about a reaction, and in the same way, in our emotional world every action, behavior, and movement brings about feelings, like an unconscious rapid answer to everything that is happening, every time uniquely colored.
Yet, what happens when society’s ideas force us to repress our emotions? Emotions are indeed under the brain’s control because they constitute a biological entity, even animals have them, with the difference being that they do not possess the cerebral capability to understand them and respond accordingly. We so often abuse this capability by killing our own emotional world. This constant hide and seek, and our unawareness to work on our feelings, are unfortunately dolorous and detrimental to us, but it has also been proved that they affect to a large extent our relationships with others. Firstly, when it comes to us, we create the illusion- and live inside it-we do not yield, instead, we are masters of ourselves, and we control everything about us. We eventually end up being truly unaware of who we are, feeling trapped in our own body, not being able to interpret our reactions. The problem, however, does not end there, since as members of society this type of behavior is seen as problematic. We cannot interpret others’ feelings besides our own, and thus communication and understanding become extremely difficult. With this behavior, we exclude ourselves from society, and build a wall around us so as not to be touched, but, we forget that we are also incapable of touching the people around us, and it is well-known that humans are social beings that cannot live without companionship.
All of my previous thoughts and concerns made me acknowledge that in the end everyone who experiences things in a balanced way is a strong human being. Our life should be an amalgamation of logic and emotion, fairly distributed. With respect to ourselves, we have to give time and space to our feelings, at a time when emotions are synonymous with weakness. To realize and broadcast the fact that true weakness is the inability to recognize yourself, not to interpret it. After all, feelings, sometimes dishonest to logic, constitute the spice that gives flavor to our lives.