Reflection of Feelings

I saw my first client in 2017, toward the beginning of my time in graduate school. Before my cohort and I saw our cases, we practiced therapeutic basics with one another, such asking open-ended questions instead of closed-ended questions to encourage deeper exploration, or reflecting and paraphrasing statements to get to the gist and the heart of the matter. Though these techniques feel automatic to me now, I still remember how much my listening skills – and my self-awareness – improved when I started using them on a consistent basis.

“You don’t really go toward sadness,” my first therapy supervisor told me, way back in 2017.

Oh, What If

The other day I talked for two and a half hours with this really cute radical Asian guy from California. Over Zoom, we chatted about what got us into leftist frameworks, discrimination in the dating scene, and whether it felt possible to create meaningful justice-oriented change in academia. I liked our conversation a lot. While I tend to be outgoing and energetic in conversations, he had a chill and mellow vibe I found refreshing. The somewhat unfortunate news: he’s straight.

I am letting myself feel sad about his straightness. I recognize that even if he were not straight, we had literally one conversation which may not have turned into anything anyway. But this California guy stood out to me. One of my previous crushes was radical yet not emotionally available or mature, and another was more emotionally available yet not that radical. California guy seemed to have both, the radical social justice leaning and the emotional availability. I feel a little sad about not getting to know him in a romantic way.

Over the past few years, I have gotten a lot better about giving myself space to feel sadness.

Tennis Helped Transform Me from Sad and Lonely to Righteously Angry at the Patriarchy

My current crush fell in love with another man last fall. We agreed to stop talking a couple of weeks ago, so he could have space to figure his life out. Who knows if he will reach out again. I spent a lot of last week sad about this, listening to melodramatic Ariana Grande and Jason Derulo songs and posting angsty selfies on Snapchat. On top of that, I felt that one of my friends had not been putting as much effort into our friendship as I had, and when I expressed this, she did not react well. I also waited to hear back from an internship I wanted yet received no word about. To describe my emotions with great eloquence: everything sucked.

Two Tuesday nights ago, as I moped about V – my crush who said he also had a crush on me and also fell in love with someone else – I went to one of my weekly tennis leagues.

Caring in the Storm

I have never felt so empty before.

A few weeks ago, J tore me apart. They told me that our friendship meant nothing to them, that caring about me made them feel like they lived a lie, that they would enjoy college more if they could forget about me. J meant so much to me, and they used that knowledge only to bludgeon me, to break me apart.

I had so much to accomplish today, with over 15 things on my to-do list. But just a few hours ago, I got a text from someone with bad news. I tried to reach out, but everyone I knew had something occupying them – a train ride, a week full of exams, their own issues, etc. – so I made the worst mistake.

I called J.

Who I Wish I Was

Sometimes, I wish I was a bird. Sometimes, I wish I was skinnier. Sometimes, I wish I was nobody and somebody else all at once.

People decide who they want to be by looking at other people. In society, those who are above us are our standards. If someone has a job that pays $100,000 while ours only pays $50,000, we want to be that person, or at least have their job. If someone has a gorgeous partner and we don’t have one at all, we wish we were that person. If someone has something that we crave but cannot have, we envy that person.

It’s like that in high school.

Why We All Should Just Cry And Get Angry

Image via Goodreads.

If you’ve read some of my prior posts you’ve probably realized that I can be freakishly kind of emotional. Everyone is. However, in society, expressions of emotion are often interpreted as indications of weakness or immaturity. There is some truth to this. People who continuously drown themselves in dark and negative thoughts or become angry and irritated over insignificant matters may need to reevaluate their mindsets, or just, as my English teacher said, “quit whining” (although she used the verb form of a curse word meaning female dog, but, I won’t write that here).

But expressing emotions shouldn’t solely be seen as a shortcoming.

Child Abuse and Depression

Image via psyblogger.com

One of the least shocking yet most troubling consequences of child abuse is depression. Victims of child abuse are prone to suffer from this disease at some time in their life, either in recurring episodes or long stretches.

The reason I do not find this surprising is because it makes sense, to put it blatantly. As a child your brain is continuing to develop, so abuse introduces an influx of stress hormones that can potentially alter and rewire your brain in an abnormal way. I’m not a psychologist or a scientist, but even as a mere high-school student, I can clearly see the long-term negative effects of child abuse.

Removing the scientific aspect of abuse and focusing on the social angle, it remains obvious how child abuse causes depression. A myriad, even a majority of child abuse perpetrators are related to their respective victims. Loneliness and social isolation are key concepts of depression – and isn’t it true that your family is supposed to always be there for you? To listen to you and accept you as who you are? Unfortunately, some children do not have that luxury. As a result they suffer physically and mentally.

Though I had a blast on the cruise I went on recently, I immediately felt sad again once I returned home to certain members of my family. To ameliorate this I began reading The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs  by Stephen S. Ilardi. Here’s a quote I stumbled upon right at the beginning (page 32):

“Likewise, the protective presence of loved ones – which our forebears experienced for the better part of each day – gives the brain a strong, primal signal that we’re probably no longer in any immediate danger, so it ratchets down the stress response accordingly.”

This quote supplies evidence as to why victims of abuse possess irregular stress patterns. I’m sure others can relate to me when I say that I do feel like I’m in immediate danger in the “protective presence of loved ones”, and that my “stress response” actually shoots skyward during that time.

I digress. It’s important to remember that despite what I’ve written here, victims of child abuse are not helpless in the face of despair. I read, I run, I write, and I do many other things in order to fight depression. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.

Child abuse hotline: 1-800-4-A-CHILD

Anger

Anger is a double-edged sword. One can wield anger to their advantage, ruthlessly tearing into whoever is unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of the emotion; or, anger can turn into quicksand, enveloping and completely encompassing its owner until nothing remains.

Personally, I do not like anger. I have seen too many people angry – angry at the world, angry at me, and angry at themselves. Sometimes, the anger is warranted. Most of the time it is not.

When people are angry, they are blind. Unable to view the world from a different perspective besides their own. This reminds me of the bull launching itself at the red flag, not processing what may be behind that flag… possibly an impenetrable wall. But by then, it is too late.

Anger leads to a multitude of other emotions. Two that affect me the most are fear and sadness. The difference is that one is caused by another person’s anger, while the other is caused by my own.

Fear. I can reasonably estimate that 99% of the times I am fearful are due to anger. When one is angry, one is violent. Violence leads to pain. Pain leads to suffering. Suffering leads to fear.

Sadness. I do not ever want to be angry. An unrealistic goal, I’m aware. However, when one attempts to control their anger and force it back into themselves, it changes into an unrelenting sadness. A permanent sadness. A depression. This only occurs when there are not enough sources of strength to use to recover, which, in the past, was my case exactly.

I believe that the opposite of anger is self-control. The ability to feel anger – to experience its terrible power racing through your veins – and not act impulsively on it. Rather, to use that anger and manipulate it into a self-dignified motivation, a driving force per say. This is the emotion I want to learn, to feel, and to use.

Disaffected

Disaffected (adjective): Having lost faith or loyalty; discontent.

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.” – Rollo May