I recently got dumped. This was my first ever “real” relationship and thus first ever “real” breakup. I initially told myself “Sinem! This is going to be hard! But we are prepared for this. You know how to deal with hard emotions now, it is simple: “You are going to let yourself feel it!”.
And so I did. I let myself cry and feel everything I am feeling for a WHOLE WEEK. After a week, I went to Turkey, started a highly time intensive workshop and I was dealing with a lot of health issues. I wasn’t thinking about what had happen. It looked like this one was going to let me off the hook easily. After a month, I came back to Luxembourg and all hell broke loose.
I was feeling more than I was willing and it was taking me longer than I allowed myself to feel those feelings.
Another layer came on top. RESISTANCE. SHAME. I was actively resisting my sadness and confusion. I was frustrated by ME. On top of that, I had missed the appropriate time of having negative feelings to talk about it in casual conversations. Everybody (including me) was expecting for me to feel better by now. So, I had to put a mask and pretend I was fine. To myself, to my family, at work, with my friends. The pretender started to run the show and I buried myself deep inside the ground until I had to come back for a fresh air.
This experience made me realize our discomfort around negative feelings. We literally have no space for them in our lives. Whenever they come to visit, we are confused on how the hell we are going to fit them in our lives. We are also equally frustrated by other people’s unwanted guests. We want them to leave the house so we can be comfortable and have fun with our friends again. We literally chose the small houses and we didn’t buy any material for the guests (even though we know we would have frequent visits) and now we are frustrated that they are taking up our space. How stupid is that?
Even in rom-com movies, (which I am a big fan of) The lead gets dumped, we see a few scenes of their sadness and suddenly time accelerates (like a slide show of moments) or literally time jumps (to a future date) and the story continues from there. By than our lead is ready to meet another person or gets back with their previous partner. We are actively in ignorance of the time in-between. That is what I expected from my experience as well. A time jump so I didn’t have to deal with my heartbreak, sadness and fears.
Susan Cain, author of Quiet recently published a new book called “Bittersweet”. In which she talks about how the “bitter” is slowly diminishing from our lives and we are only expected to feel and embody the “sweet” parts ALL THE TIME! We live in denial of death, sadness and in general the transitory nature of things. This is a double edged sword. When we shut the sorrow we also shut down the authentic happiness. Life is bittersweet and we all should stop acting like it is not.
How can we make space for our own sorrow?
How can we make space for other’s sorrow?
Do we have to fix things right away? Is it really possible?
What would be like to sit with pain silently for how long it takes?
Can we please stop pretending that humans are happy, moisturized and motivated beings %100 of the time?
I am fucking tired of putting my mask and costumes on every day. I am tired of memorizing my lines to make other people feel comfortable. I am tired of resisting my emotions and feeling ashamed of them.
I am heartbroken. I am sad. Rejection triggered a lot of body image issues I had as a child that I buried deep, deep within and haven’t had the courage to look at. It is all coming back to me and it is all a lot to take in. My brain is fogged and I haven’t felt authentic joy in the last couple of months.
I don’t want to deny this pain away. I don’t want to numb or look away from. Living in pain won’t kill me and living in denial is no living at all.
So today my question is:
How will you let yourself feel bitter?
How will you make space for other people’s sorrow?
Welcome to the newest section of Flux newsletter: “What am I _?” I will share questions, things I am reading, listening etc. Hope you enjoy!
What am I ___?
Reading 📚
We, too, have snickered at the fat body at the beach, shamed the transgender body at the grocery store, pitied the disabled body while clothes shopping, maligned the aging body. We have demanded the apology from other bodies. We have ranked our bodies against the bodies of others, deciding they are greater or lesser than our own based on the prejudices and biases we inherited.
When we are honest with ourselves, we feel gross about the way we vulture other humans, picking apart their bodies, consuming them for the sake of our own fragile sense of self. We feel gross when we think about all the vicious, cruel comments we’ve heard leveled against people’s bodies; comments spoken around us without a single protest from us.
Many of us have oriented our entire lives around an effort to be normal, never realizing that normal is not a stationary goal. It keeps moving while we dance a perpetual foxtrot, jitterbug, and paso doble around it, trying to catch up and confused when we finish each day exhausted and uninspired by this party called life.
Remember that we live in a world of default bodies, the bodies we imagine when we close our eyes. The default body becomes the template for the normal body. The only reason we would need to erase someone’s difference is because we still equate difference with danger or undesirability.
Yes, we believed that our bodies were too big, too dark, too pale, too scarred, too ugly, so we tucked, folded, hid ourselves away and wondered why our lives looked infinitesimally smaller than what we knew we were capable of.
It is thin privilege that installs the belief that if someone cannot fit in a chair at a restaurant, their body is the problem, not the manufacturer who made the chair or the restaurant owner who chose it.
Systems do not maintain themselves; even our lack of intervention is an act of maintenance.
Recognizing Wholeness: People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.
Find more of the quotes I saved in my Goodreads page!
Listening 🎧
I have so many amazing podcasts for you today!
We Can Do Hard Things Episode “All the Feels” by Glennon, Sister & Abby
Glennon talks about hard feelings in the most amazing way possible. She will help you fell less lonely in your struggle with human condition.
Unf*ck Your Brain Episode “Clean vs Dirty Pain” by Kara Lowenthail
When I say sit with you feelings and actually allow yourself to feel them, it doesn’t mean, dwell on your memories and imagine scenories in your head. There is a clean & dirty way of experiencing pain. Let’s dive deep into the details.
Unlocking Us Episode “How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole with Susan Cain” by Brene Brown
Here, Susan Cain and Brene Brown discuss the bittersweetness. I felt like I found my people. Below is a passage that I took completely out of the conversation because I think it is just too important for people to understand!
Susan Cain: So the ideal of heaven in an everyday sense was replaced by the ideal of success, of material success. And how did you show that you were materially successful? Well, it was by being a business person, by winning. And the way that you did that, if you were going to be a winner, you had to show that you had the emotional traits of a winner.
And so we went through this period, as part of something that was called the New Thought movement, we went through this period where all of a sudden the idea of expressing any kind of worry, any kind of doubt, any kind of negative feelings, anything other than cheerfully whistling through hardship, which is what Boy Scouts were taught to do explicitly. Anything other than that was seen as being the sign of being a “loser”, so fast forward to the Depression in the 1930s, where all these business people and everyday people are becoming bankrupt through forces having nothing to do with themselves, but there became this question all of a sudden that if you went bankrupt, if you lost, was it the problem of the system or was it some kind of mysterious flaw in the soul of the person who had lost? And increasingly, we started to believe that the problem lay inside the person who had lost. And so if you look back at the era of the Depression, there are all these headlines that would say things like, “Loser commits suicide.” A kind of excoriation of the people who were suffering. And then if you trace it through the 20th century, the word loser becomes used more and more and more and more.
Watching 🕶
I am sharing a total masterpiece talk with you! Glennon Doyle is my personal hero and this talk helps you understand all the ways we are all pretending and suffering as a consequence of it.
So, see you next week!