"If You Cannot Fill Your Own Cup, You Could Ask For Help" Sticker from my little Redbubble Shopsie.
Oh. Oh dear.
This post has been hard. I woke up early this morning thinking I would add a few cute illustrations to a zine about self-care and community-care.
But I can't.
For one, I'm not a healthcare professional. Making blanket statements about feeling feelings that are not my own seems prescriptive. And probably dangerous. I'm just a human with emotions. I can't tell anyone else how to process their emotions. However... I can wholeheartedly recommend asking for help.
Sharing heavy emotions was not a part of my human training program. I grew up internalizing the directive that heavy emotions are personal, and sharing those emotions is not endorsed. I would define heavy emotions as sadness, grief, anger, and the like. The stubborn types of feelings that tend to stick around longer than they're appreciated. So I grew up thinking if I spilled the beans on the heavy shit, I would just make a mess. A mess no one would want to help me clean up.
What I'm finding out as I rewrite my human training manual (see; parenting my own children), is that emotions are not meant to stagnate in our bodies. They are energy, and they need to be acknowledged, felt, and moved on. I do not have an exact model of how to do this. I'm not even sure one exists that can apply to the entire human experience.
What I can report, is the information I found out while sharing the heaviest emotions I've felt in a long time.
• I am not alone.
• The people I love want to love me back.
• The burdens I carry feel lighter when I share them.
I count myself very lucky. And also smart. I've been surrounding myself with some of the most caring and loving people in the world. Some of them actually ARE trained mental health professionals. I also believe each of us can learn how to respond to the people we care about when they share their heavy emotions. I also learned I feel closer to the people I have confided in.
As a recovering Toxic Positivitist, I was under the impression that sharing would cause me to be cast out. Exposed as the Debbie Downer I always feared! Instead, I'm discovering that leading with genuine vulnerability can lead to deeper relationships. Which is important to me. I love making friends. But I dream about building community.
Real Community comes from meeting difficult moments with warmth and openness.
As I metabolized this post, I kept running into the word Vibe. It's not the first time I've heard this word, but it's the first time it's caught my attention. So I asked about it. It was described to me as "...living in relation to a bodily feeling... an antidote to philosophy's historical over reliance on language and reason and the mind."
This stuck me as another missing piece of my self/community care journey. How could someone go about building a safe space? A place to vibe?
Based on what has helped me survive this week mostly intact:
• Be welcoming to those who are not at their best.
• Model a safe emotional space. For children, this could mean encouraging compassionate responses to heavy feelings. For caregivers, this can mean the release of expectations and judgement when the humans in their care still need practice experiencing heavy feelings.
• A safe way to "tap out." I'm imagining staff at the future Bonus Room on hand to facilitate and guide caregivers (when asked!) through tough situations. I'd also like learning opportunities for caregivers to fill tool boxes for future situations instead of relying on reactions on the fly.
• Arriving with the vibe that we are all doing our best, and responding with warmth and curiosity instead of judgement.
This post feels a bit one-sided. I'd love your help filling in how you feel better after heavy stuff happens. Care to share? The comments are open, or you can email me at [email protected]. Thanks for reading, friends.