One of the hardest things for me to come to terms with is the fact that it is okay to be emotional. This may not be the revelation you were expecting, but it’s the one I’ve been struggling to see.
It’s very easy to tell other people that feeling emotions are normal and acceptable, but I don’t think that we encourage this as much as we think. In my experience, it is much more “okay” to be happy than it is to be sad. [I’ll keep this simple and only use these two emotions.] When we tell people that it’s okay to be emotional, many times what we really mean is that “it’s ok to feel sad for a minute, but then you need to make the choice to be happy and I don’t understand why you can’t get over that.”
Sometimes we just need to be sad. And that makes other people uncomfortable.
This was a hard thing for me to grasp until I reached a season in my life where I did not default to “happy-go-lucky.” Many of my friends are very chatty, open, and mostly cheerful people, so I often feel a pressure (unwarranted as it may be) to meet them there and be equally cheerful. I don’t want to be the person who kills the mood. That’s what Sam Smith music is for, right? Additionally, I don’t like to be in the center of attention, and being the one sad person in a room of cheerful people is bound to shift the focus of the group. No, thank you, I would rather bottle it up and then deal with it later when there’s no one there to see me.
There are two problems with this logic (that I will address).
First, God created us to have emotions, and to have a spectrum of emotions. I would venture to say very few people believe that sadness is a sin. While I don’t necessarily believe in a God that inflicts situations on us to make us sad, I think it’s a legitimate emotion He uses to bring us closer to Him and the people around us. It’s also a very humbling emotion. No one looks good sad. No one looks good crying (okay, there are probably a few people who look great no matter what). The point is that when we open up about emotions other than joy, it leads to moments that forge strong, meaningful relationships.
[Aside: joy can also do this. But we know that already.]
This brings me to the second problem: we were never meant to do this alone. These moments humble us to completely rely on others, rather than ourselves, for love and comfort. I think what is off-putting for a lot of us is that we can’t be certain that other people will come through for us. We’ve all been hurt by people who didn’t have time to listen to us. This is where we are forced to trust that God is good and will provide that community. If I can take a moment to psychoanalyze myself (bear with me), I can think of several times in the past year that I have been put in situations where someone I thought I could trust did not come through for me emotionally. This accumulated to weeks and months of self-doubt and self-loathing, asking myself “why are you like this?” and “why can’t you be happy?” and “what’s wrong with you?” Questions like these lead to dark spirals of insanity where it seems that the only answer is that you are worthless, loathsome, and unwanted.
If you are asking yourself questions like this, and driving yourself crazy trying to ignore feelings that can no longer be ignored, I pray that you don’t try to go through it alone. You don’t have to, and you’re not meant to. I cannot emphasize enough that you are not weird, wrong, broken, shameful, or unloveable if you “can’t get yourself together.” It’s taken me so, so long to discover this and to hear God telling me “I love you no matter what.” God loves all of us whether we’re at our most joyful or our most despicable. His love is not one that can be enhanced by smiles nor deterred by tears.
My point: don’t ignore emotions you feel. Every emotion is a legitimate emotion and has its place. We all learned in middle school health class that bottling up your feelings is unhealthy for you, so I’m not going to give you a lecture on how to deal with them. I want you to know that you are no less of a person for feeling sad, or stressed, or frustrated, while everyone around you seems overflowing with joy. You are not at all less lovable or worthy for feeling sadness. God will provide you a community with listening ears and encouraging words no matter where you are in life.