Wabi Sabi

This post won‘t all be as verbose as that title, don’t fear readers. It will however, aim to be brutally honest about something i have come across a lot of as a human and am still no closer to figuring out.

Over the past little while, I’ve been really trying to take that slightly bullshit slogan of “”acknowledge your emotions… don’t suppress, FEEL”. Spoiler alert; this is far easier said than done.

But nonetheless, i tried. To feel angry. Livid in fact. To feel broken and upset and melancholic, even over small seemingly insignificant things.

The the small problem arose of what we young people nowadays call “getting into your feels”. I became so fully invested into feeling these emotions, i would blow them far out of perspective and overthink them far too much.

My brother recently told me how he too struggles with this balancing act. For him, it shows up in his irritation. My brother is a person who refuses to live in a way that he doesn’t believe in. He can‘t lie about how he feels and will never pretend to love, or hate, or live. This makes him both wonderful and infuriating.

We’ve been raised by an optimistic-on-the-brink-of-naive mother and a realistic-in-fact-rather-misanthropic father. This, as you can imagine, has led to some rather conflicting moments when it comes to positive outlooks on life.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocator for silver linings. However i also learnt about a pretty vital and very real concept called “Toxic Positivity”.

Kendra Cherry from verywellmind describes signs of toxic positivity on her published article as;

So recently I’ve been grappling with balancing this:

This seemingly sickly-sweet theory, that does more damage than good, with the importance of putting things in enough perspective to not get caught in a spindle of one’s own emotions.

I’ve realized that i need to allow myself to feel my emotions, to acknowledge them as i would something physical and tangible. But I’ve also realized this means acknowledging ALL my feelings. The bad ones, yes, but the good ones too. Means i have to accept that things are probably far from perfect, but to accept that that is also more than okay.

It’s a delicate and difficult balance, but not an impossible one and i often get help from the people i love around me.