Do you ever feel like the pain of being alive is just too much?
I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I think it’s hormones. Sometimes I think it’s empathy. Sometimes I wonder if it’s fibromyalgia (joke, but also I do have it so it can be honestly hard to know.. *laugh-cry*).
Seriously though. I don’t know what it is.
Like, right now. I’m sitting here. I feel this ache across my cheeks. It goes down both arms, and into my fingers. It feels like my skin is crying.
Is it grief? I have a nice, large portion of it in my life right now. Grieiving lost relationships, grieving family-related things. Grieving just about everything I see in the news cycle.
Is it being an enneagram 4?
Anyway whatever it is, is occuring today.
I used to try to hide from feelings like this, or try to make it go away. If I listen to it, it makes me feel like I might break in half.
I think that, at least for me, this is part of what it means to be a human being. To feel this … whatever it is. I know that many/most/maybe even all people feel this way sometimes. I truly don’t know. There has been no Consumer Index Profile done on people feeling pain/emotions. (Is that a thing? Did I make that up? I feel like I might have just made that up?)
Anyway I used to listen to Headspace meditation recordings- on the Headspace app- and there was this one series on Anxiety that really helped me, and there was this one meditation in it when the dude- the dude who speaks – sorry I know he has a name
said something like “and just remember that the way you feel right now is something others feel, too.” And I was like… *poof.* I don’t know why that got to me but I was like.. you mean we have shared human experiences? Anxiety, or grief, or whatever other feeling, isn’t something that we are the only singular human being on the earth to have experienced?
Of course this is obvious, but I’d never thought about it, and it really, really got to me, to think that we have similar experiences, across people, and populations. It sounds kind of bland or blasé, as if it were a “nice little bow” to tie things up with… but it’s a truly overwhelming thing, for me, to consider how many of our feelings are shared experiences, or commonly held ones.
This pain I feel- like being on low-key, tolerable yet slightly-unpleasant fire- is probably something others feel too. How beautiful and awful it is, to feel!!!! How beautiful and awful.
