I Used To Be . . .

Feelings

I used to be afraid to express my feelings.  I suppressed them and avoided intimacy.  I saw expressing feelings as a sign of weakness.  When I was a boy my father said,  “A man never cries.  He remains strong.”

I admired Mr. Spock on Star Trek.  I tried to be logical and emotionless.  I was involved in relationships but always kept my partners at a distance.  I feared intimacy.  I was like the Simon & Garfunkel song,  I Am A Rock.

. . . A rock feels no pain,
And an island never cries.

I was too young to understand the real meaning behind the lyrics.  I took the lyrics literally.

And then?  And then I reached a point when my suppressed feelings overwhelmed me.  The flood of feelings caused me to start the journey from my head to my heart.  Feelings flowed and overflowed.  They could not be neatly packed up and stored away.  Someone told me, “The best way to deal with a feeling is to feel it.”  And so I did.

Of course, people afraid of expressing their feelings saw me as weak.  They lectured me that I should not be feeling what I was feeling; I was wrong to feel that way.  They yelled at me if I started to express my feelings in front of them.

I could not stop my head-to-heart journey, nor did I want to.  I felt better expressing my feelings.  The world did not end when I got hurt.  I was more open with the flow of life rather than unnaturally trying to control and regulate it.

With my rock-island attitude, I used to be, at times, such an asshole.  But that is all behind me now.

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