I felt too much, I was weak.
I feel too much, I will fail.
I felt too much, I lost control.
I felt too much, what was I thinking?
I wasn’t thinking.
I feel too much.
Emotions – much like blood, they get to our heads. Usually we take them for granted. We adapt to the sensations, and go on living… breathing.
Until we get punctured. And like sharp pins, they push against our flesh, making us bleed. We try to stop the bleed, but we can’t find it. It is invisible.
Yet so palpable…
So like ER doctors, we desperately stitch up what we can as quickly as we can. We throw away the scalpels, and hide our scars under our sleeves.
The moment after the trauma, numbness starts to kick in. It has to. After all, we sutured ourselves without any anesthesia. We need as much natural desensitization as we can get.
We are now ready, stoic. We can go out into the world again, we stopped the bleeding. We will be fine… right?
No. Not right. We are not trained ER doctors, we do not know how to suture. We are now at high risk of infection, and those around us risk contagion. And what’s worse, whenever we are touched, our wounds get re-traumatized, because they weren’t patched up well enough.
The truth is, emotions are not to be contained under sutures as if they were unstoppable bleeds. Emotions are to be felt like the wind. We are to use our senses to feel it all… with patience, and as patients.
In the midsts of the pain, we must stand still. As we stand holding on to our fragility, we realize the wind can’t kill us, it moves through us. We may be shifted, but slowly, our wounds get filled with fresh air and there is no need for sutures.
After all, we are not patients fighting to live. We are living patients learning how to feel. We can choose to numb ourselves, and risk living as coma patients. Feeling the bare minimum, simply surviving. Or, we can choose to let the winds move through us. Some winds may be stronger than others, but if we allow ourselves to feel them, we will finally realize that- unlike bad sutures, they can’t infect us to death.