On Bad Feelings

Insecurity, anxiety, shame, jealousy - even bitterness. I am no stranger to all of these bad feelings. I believe each of these, among others, fall into a bracket of emotions we often pretend we don’t have. They are not pleasant to experience, yet alone admit to harbouring them. Having felt them at such a great intensity during certain periods of my life, I coped by cultivating intricate routines and specific, rigid paths to avoid encountering them. Therefore, experiencing any of these feelings again was, to my mind, a mark of personal failure. During a recent period of physical sickness, afflicted with flu and migraines for a week, I had to become familiar with these bad feelings once more. However, this time my perspective shifted. I have had the time to consider at length to what extent emotional pain can be healthy, and how to pursue better self-understanding.

Despite my best efforts over the years, I cannot sanitise my life from any form of personal struggle; moments of poor self esteem, heartache, or bad memories. I have spent a lot of time denying and rejecting the existence of my insecurity in particular - as if shutting off the part of my brain that registered it would make it go away. Cognitive dissonance was the mental bandaid. There is something uniquely humiliating about being ashamed of certain aspects of yourself. Insecurity was not a part of me that I could tolerate, it was not any part of how I envisioned my future self, and I believed it to be illogical. So when I found myself confronted by insecurity, my gut instinct was to run in the opposite direction. I both hid from it and tried to hide it from myself; throwing over heavy blankets, concealing it from my sight and muffling its sound. But this only gave it a slight comical edge, as it turned out my insecurity would continue to trudge clumsily after me wherever I went. 

In attempting to protect yourself from any bad feelings, paradoxically, you make yourself more vulnerable to them. You become emotionally taught and fragile. Avoiding confrontation with yourself is like trying to dodge your own reflection in a house of mirrors; futile and contradictory to your efforts in finding the exit. Most importantly, allowing yourself to live in a land of willful ignorance to the real spectrum of your feelings, is not only a disservice to yourself, but to anyone else in your life. Humans are prone to affecting the people in our lives in more ways than we realise. In preoccupying yourself with avoiding something, you ironically spend more time organising your life around it. 

During my week of sickness, I was determined to be mature and truly let my body rest in order to recover and return to figuring out what I should be doing with my life. I evaded the encroaching feelings of guilt and shame arising from putting off completing new job applications, writing a newsletter, or recording a podcast episode I had promised. I listened to all the bad feelings in my body (sore throat, headaches, fatigue) while ignoring all the bad feelings in my mind (anxiety, guilt, insecurity). In the end, the bad feelings got the better of me, as they always inevitably do. The looming, familiar figure of insecurity watched me from my bedside. Burned out by the mental energy I was exerting in fighting them and a migraine preventing me from finding distractions in books and film, I was forced into a period of self-reflection. I discovered that in doing this, curiosity bloomed in place of resistance. I concluded that after so much time avoiding my insecurity, the only solution was to face it head on. I would invite it to sit down with me, tentatively peel away the heavy layers I had flung over it, and dig through to the core of this creature. Not necessarily to make it go away, but simply to find out why it was here. Curiosity and compassion have turned out to be two vital navigational forces whilst traversing through the most hostile emotional landscapes of my own brain.

One of my greatest anxieties is that I am constantly failing to meet up to my own high expectations, and that I am running out of time to accomplish these goals. I still worry about this, knowing that the present moment is the youngest I will ever be and the most time I have left. I know I should view this as an abundance, instead of an increasing scarcity of years, weeks, hours, and seconds remaining to try over and over again. On the days I feel like I do succeed; when I accomplish something I am proud of, or when I am so caught in the moment that I forget everything else entirely, these days would not be so richly saturated with a golden glow if it was not for the contrast my bad feelings provide. 

In biology and medicine, we learn to differentiate the symptoms from the cause. A fever for example, is a symptom of your body using its own heat to kill off an infection. We don’t notice our body becoming infected, but we do notice the fever. Therefore, physical pain (albeit inconvenient) is considered useful. Pain is a signifier, indicating when something has gone wrong. It is the body’s cry for attention, demanding you take a look at its source. We tend to not conceive of emotional pain in the same way. Emotional pain conflates both the symptom and the cause; a bad feeling being the target we aim to annihilate, rather than seeing the reason behind it as the target. I am not a psychologist, I do not pretend to have any insight into serious mental illness and I know there are potentially countless more complexities and nuances to psychological pain than this. However, I found that viewing my own bad feelings as symptoms gives me a moment to regain control. Instead of recoiling, I try to sit with my feelings and ask myself why? To ask this question properly means tracing the feelings back to their root of existence, which naturally involves the daunting task of being honest with yourself. This is not to say I can always solve them, but it is certainly a way to stop being at their mercy. In facing the truth of how I feel and having the resilience to investigate if there is a deeper level to them, I begin to master the art of understanding who I am.

I do not expect my bad feelings to have a cure; I no longer even wish them to go away. I want to be alerted when something is wrong and given the opportunity to apply the salve of self understanding. In acceptance I have found myself an antidote. Those collective hours I spent with curtains drawn, under my bed covers, 15 unanswered texts on my lock-screen, were hours of ignoring symptoms coming from my subconscious, calling to me: “pay closer attention to yourself”.