Our Emotional World

The Evolution of Survival & Comfort

Photo by Nahid Hatami on Unsplash

I am feeling very emotional today. Very watery.

I don’t really know why. Though there are potential reasons, it feels detached from any of them. I had a couple glasses of red wine last night, which set my neurobiology up to try and return to some kind of baseline after experiencing a surge of dopamine and GABA. What goes up must come down, and tears happen to be a regulating function, among other things. They help you get back to baseline. Other reasons I could be feeling some feelings: light relational conflict, reflections on friendships, social time that got weird and required some post-social rumination, having to get up and go to work when I’ve had a shit night’s sleep… The crushing weight of responsibility that accompanies adulthood… the new moon being in cancer and mercury being retrograde. Yes, certainly all of those things could contribute. But I’ve found myself managing life’s regular stresses and cycles pretty well lately, and again, these tears felt very untethered to these instances. I talked to my sister on the phone a couple of hours ago and told her I was feeling emotional — she sounded so concerned for me, asking what was wrong. “Nothing really is wrong,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to explain what I was experiencing.

Emotional experiences are complicated, and sometimes very hard to put into words. I think that’s why humans evolved alongside dance, art, making sounds, tears, smiles, longing stares. Some things can’t be said, they just exist.

It’s like I feel distilled down into something so raw and real. It’s like everything is touching on something inside of me, all my walls are down. The things that got to my heart and tears today are as follows: this song, the idea that me poking fun of my husband with a group of friends could have possibly hurt his feelings (he assured me it did not), me overreacting about something and adding more stress to someone’s life that I love dearly, missing my time in Scotland that happened a year ago, grieving what kinds of culture people in America have lost in the multi-culture eradication and colonization of this place, people’s efforts to find that missing piece of themselves that was lost in said ruptures, people’s efforts to be good, people who unconsciously choose fear and act accordingly, art, the loss of language as technology progresses, the loss of depth and humanity as technology progresses, the connection that technology has created, love, the slow degradation of rivers and soil, the people who dedicate their lives to protecting ecosystems, my Scotland witches holding space for my dreams this week, my friends being ready and available to hang out and play, my growing connection to tea leaf readings, fridge magnet poetry, gifting a friend a rose quartz crystal and homemade card, my puppy playing with other puppies, my puppy biting another puppy’s neck too hard and reminding me of my really lovely (and often aggressive) former dog who passed three years ago, death of loved ones, vulnerability and suicidality in comedy, laughter.

These aren’t things that are immediately overwhelming to me, and, to me, they are hard to categorize as “good” or “bad”, nor should they be categorized as such. They are a beautiful part of the human experience that hold so much love and so much grief, all at once. And I think that’s what makes humanity alive in its most raw form, when you can feel those things together. Our limited time to access the full spectrum of human emotion for what it is.

Emotion, to me, is everything.

As I come back to work as a mental health therapist after a week of vacation, I have had to be effortful in finding ways to recommit to this work, because I’m feeling a little burnt out. Unfortunately, my vacation wasn’t terribly nourishing or rejuvenating. And in that process, trying to figure out what I’m doing here in this life and in this work, I found myself coming back to emotion being the backbone of a fulfilling human experience. It is simply helpful information on the one hand. Emotions let us know how to act and what to do, teach us about our values and what is important, keep us morally situated, keep us alive, keep us safely connected or disconnected. But more importantly, emotions are the absolute core of both our biggest fears and our biggest connection to this whole life because they are so tied to our survival as a social species. And we are terrified of that; many of us are very emotionally stunted. Something I believe has to do with the value we place on emotions within the unbalanced patriarchal society we have created — a topic for another time.

The more comfortable a world we have created for ourselves, without an immediate need for survival (for many humans, but certainly not all humans), the more we lose capacity to feel. Because we thought we could play God and just feel the “good” feelings but not the “bad” ones. We decided to build a world where we could cruise past those, we decided they had no value or purpose. But what we lost in taking the bad away, or really just temporarily avoiding the bad, was the ability to even access the good. In effect, we actually don’t even know what to do with the good ones now because we associate them with the duality that they exist in; they are a sign that the opposite emotion is out there and it’s coming for us. I see this time after time in the therapy room, a person will not allow themselves to feel any level of joy that comes their way because it has come to mean a threat is around the corner. OR, the things we associate with good feelings are actually empty in the end, because they are just things. I think we have created this evolutionary trait in ourselves, this fear of feeling.

Those positive feelings used to be there for us to rest in. To rejoice in. To bring us into a state of balance so that together we could conquer what came next. But now, many of us read them as a signal of upcoming danger, or we can’t even navigate toward them because we have overinflated certain values and achievements with positive feelings. We are in a constant state of holding everything at bay, keeping ourselves from feeling anything outside of our control, and it is exhausting us physically and spiritually.

So perhaps my vague emotional state this week was actually a wonderful gift. An expanded capacity to feel it all. Because I have been working tirelessly on my capacity to feel and on my connection to spirituality as an everyday mundane occurrence. And within that, I couldn’t pinpoint just one feeling, or just one cause. It was everything, all of it, and it was beautiful because it was all so human. And I hope you let yourself go there and get to experience it from time to time as well.