Linger In An Emotional State

Linger In An Emotional State

John Paul Derryberry

It wasn't even a month after my dad died that I had someone suggest it was time to not be sad. It was even quicker after the death of a friend in my senior year. Within two weeks, I was told life would move on, and so must I. While those statements are technically factual, they lack the human emotional element that we all experience in the world. If you had to pinpoint two moments that directly shaped my view of the world, it would be those deaths. Still, the two moments that shaped my actions were the interactions in those moments, where I wasn't allowed to be sad about something I should have been sad about. 

The roots of my emotional work run deep, and if you follow them, they begin with the notion I rejected: We have to move through sadness at a different pace than our own. As I matured, through my emotional growth, and interacted with many folks on the same path I was, I started to realize that we do this with about every emotion we experience. We rush through it, avoid it, or ignore it, and the advice we receive about it is the same. 

Have you ever experienced a struggle with sadness and immediately had people around do everything they could to solve it? Yes, we all have. It's a nice feeling, yet often, it leaves us feeling like our sadness is not truly felt, let alone that it stays around long enough to process what we are sad about. It's essential for us to sit a little while in our emotions; they are communicating something, usually something vital to the state of our lives. That's what emotions do- not just the ones we like to feel, but all of them. 

The putting off of understanding my sadness, and just how far I went to ignore it, took me down numerous wrong paths. I often see the same thing with so many others; being uncomfortable with whatever we are feeling. Even excitement and happiness can make many of us uncomfortable. Good feelings, feelings that make life worth living, give us pause. As I've continued my journey to understand emotions and help others understand theirs; I've found that the folks who do not just lean into emotions but move through them, experience them, and learn what they are communicating to us, grow into a better version of themselves. 

We learn to linger in happiness longer because we know it can be fleeting. We understand that sadness does not mean life is horrible. It means parts of our lives do not match our expectations. I could go through each emotion we experience and point out why we would do better to allow them to stay with us longer than society usually allows. We learn so much about ourselves, and the human experience, when we process emotions and don't just ignore them. We can attempt to learn to feel our emotions better, as we grow and age. And, we might one day, finally, understand what they are communicating to us: if we start to listen.