I’ve been feeling all the emotions the last few days. I feel sad, disappointed and just pretty much broken hearted and that prompted a conversation with my middle son yesterday. We were both sat at the kitchen table and my son, who is a psychology student, was giving me a pep talk because he could see I was struggling with emotions that were starting to make it difficult for me to motivate myself. He is 20 years old and for someone so young, full of amazing advice but lacking in the experience to back it up. I on the other hand have an absolute ton of experience, so between us we can usually talk things out and it helps, for the most part.

We talked about the fact that I have always felt things deeply. I go “all in” with my emotions and feelings and don’t really know how not too. That means I experience the good times as amazing but in contrast the difficult times can be tough to get through. I suppose I just don’t do things by halves. My ex husband used to say I was always on an emotional rollercoaster but I can see now that maybe due to the fact that he was on the opposite end of the spectrum and was great at shutting his emotions away. I felt enough for both of us! How I would love to be able to turn the intensity of those feelings down when things are hard, maybe learn to box those emotions up and store them locked away tightly in a dusty recess of my mind. Can’t other people do that? I thought so from observing friends and family, reading books and watching tv, everyone seems so much more capable of balancing how they feel. Other people just seem to be able to handle their emotions better, or at least it seems so. So I question myself, Is this something I need to train myself to do?

Well my son told me “he didn’t think it worked like that” and this is just who I am. My personality is that I’m a sensitive, an empath, some may say. Sitting opposite us during this conversation was my daughter. She is 13 years old and I see her and how she is navigating the emotions of adolescence, the hormones, her personality and sensitive nature and It’s like replaying my own youth. A tough time. She feels deeply and is a deep thinker and has learnt to adapt to the feelings of others around her. She can read the room and naturally tries to make others feel ok if something is “off”. She has seen me do that and it can drain you if you practice it throughout life. Would she have always had that ability or was it learnt from me? Have I magnified it? I wish I’d learnt earlier in life to not feel responsible for other peoples emotions, to not feel responsible for making other feel comfortable because when you learn that early in life, and practise that behaviour routinely as you become an adult, you lose yourself, you stop expressing who you are in order to make everyone around you happy. Being yourself is a skill and knowing you are not responsible for how people respond to you or feel about you comes with confidence and self worth. I am working on instilling this in my daughter, now I’ve finally learnt it myself at 47! What other people think of you is really none of your business. I hope I can teach that to my daughter now.

So today when scrolling social media I watched a short clip of a man saying he feels deeply too. He talks about speaking with his therapist about this and explaining to them that he wishes he could sit with his emotions in the middle of the scale rather than with the highs and lows and what his therapist replied really spoke to me. His therapist said if you imagine a heart monitor, its going up and down and if you were to put it in the middle, you would be flatlining. Life is about the highs and lows and when you are in a high you know that life will bring you the opposite at some point.

Who wants to live their life flatlining? Feel the excitement, passion, be enthusiastic, open your heart to love and when the lows come, you will learn from them, they will be hard but you will come out the other side stronger and with a wisdom and appreciation for life and the simple things. Its helped me to understand that my sensitivity to life’s rollercoaster of emotions is not necessarily a negative. I am thankful that I can experience the excitement at the simple things. For me, I believe life is an experience, not all of it will be wonderful but your mindset is what makes it bearable. So I will keep leaning into those emotions, stay open to all experiences and positive about what those experiences good or bad bring into my life and hopefully teach my daughter the same.

Growing, Healing, Living Life.