Today is rainy. Not the kind of rain that has been making me freak out lately (I have a phobia of thunderstorms and tornadoes…), but the kind that makes me want to open a window, curl up in a window seat with a cup of something cozy to drink and a good book or a journal. Thankfully my husband is off of work today due to a holiday, and we are meeting up with family for dinner and looking at old family photos, and it’s just a kind of “take it as it goes” kind of day, where I don’t have to be stressing about what’s for dinner or having to run errands by a certain time.
These kinds of days make me think a lot – or at least, they give me time to actually process thoughts and feelings, rather than shove them aside or deep down to deal with at another time.
And of course, as soon as I am writing this, Miss E woke up from her nap. That lasted a while, haha (not).
Aw, my sweet husband just came in to take her for a while so I can work on this blog post. Thanks, Love.
I am feeling kinda sad today. But also kinda happy at the same time. A second brother just got married yesterday. My husband’s grandpa passed away last week. It’s been better early summer weather than it has been for a long time – in fact we even actually had spring this year! I have 2 beautiful children and a husband who chose to marry me even with all my flaws and things that I unfortunately do that drive him crazy. I am fairly active, but I also am really starting to get a “mom bod”. I have dreams I want to reach, things that have even been forgotten or pushed aside for years that I really still do love and feel passionate and excited about. My extended family is growing. I am too far away from most of my actual extended family like grandparents and aunts and cousins and I wish I was closer. My parents are divorcing after almost 30 years of marriage. My husband and I want to have our homestead someday in the near future. I am really worried about how that will happen or if I will have the energy for it. Our finances are ok right now but they normally kinda suck. My husband is employed, thankfully, and honestly works for a pretty good company. I am tired a lot. I am eating better because I notice what foods actually make my body feel good and healthy. I sometimes crave stuff I really don’t need (maybe because I am stressed). We are figuring out where we want to go through a faith crisis. We are parents and figuring out parenting stuff. It’s tornado season in the Midwest.
My point to all that random stuff is that our lives are constantly evolving, life is full of ups and downs. And guess what – those ups and downs kinda tend to happen simultaneously, which makes for what my mother-in-law calls “Beautiful Chaos”. My aunt texted me the other day a screenshot of a lady’s post on facebook. The woman posted a picture of herself drinking a cup of coffee, half smiling, bags under her eyes, and she commented about how this was a picture of herself, tired and worn out as heck, but also happy and fulfilled. This resonated with me.
When we are small, we tend to learn from flashcards, songs, books, movies that there are emotions of “happy” “sad” “angry” etc. and I don’t know about you, but I got the impression that if you were happy, you couldn’t be sad. If you were angry, you couldn’t be happy. And so on. They were separate and distinct feelings.
Then I got a little bit older and I remember seeing this slab of a magnet on my grandparents’ fridge that had maybe 20 different stick-figure-type faces (emojis of sorts, before emojis were a thing) and a little red frame that you could put over what emotion you were feeling that day. There were so many more emotions than “happy” and “sad”, some of which I had heard the names for, and many of which I learned about for probably the first time. Some of my favorite words were “melancholy” or “bittersweet” over the next few years, and it struck me very much at the phenomena of someone being able to “cry happy tears”. This was my first branch-off into the possibility of 2 feelings being able to exist at once at the same moment inside of someone.
My early- to mid-teenage years came along and my family really started to go through some challenges, both outside and inside the family. I started to feel what I later learned were anxiety and depression. (I remember when I realized that this is what I was struggling with that I connected learning about depression because my grandmother had apparently struggled with it during most of her life. My mom had originally told me that depression is basically when someone is really sad. So I had tried to make sure that I cheered up my grandmother as much as I could at a point). One of my parents would come up to me and would basically force me to tell them why I was feeling the way I was, and I couldn’t pinpoint it at the time. I just felt sad and listless, and like I wanted to sleep or browse on my laptop for hours on end. Not being able to identify the reason at the time was really rough on me, partly because then I started to feel even more like something was wrong with me and I was disappointing my parents; and as I did start to slowly realize why I was feeling what I was feeling, I was scared to open up to my parents about it becuase a lot of it involved them, and I already felt like I was less-than, and a disappointment, and like I would be in trouble for sharing. I felt stuck, which, if you struggle with depression or anxiety as well, you will well know only makes those things worse. Feeling stuck absolutely stinks.
I am finally seeking more help with my depression and anxiety and some other things I struggle with, and my husband is right there beside me through it, as he promised he would be.
But depression aside, I am realizing that in the english language, we don’t have a word (that I am aware of) for most of the emotions we experience in a given time of our lives. We are complex creatures. I realized one day a couple of years ago when my side of the family was officially falling apart, that I was experiencing a melting pot, or a salad bowl of emotions all at once that went beyond “bittersweet”. In my opinion, things like “bittersweet” apply to a single situation (like when you are heading home from vacation, for instance, and it is bitter because you really enjoyed your vacation, but it is sweet because you also can’t wait to be home). But my family was officially falling apart which was causing me feelings of deep grief and guilt, but at the same time I felt a freedom and a relief due to all this finally making progress instead of just festering as it had been for years (this part I call bittersweet), and also at the same moment I felt so absolutely content and happy because I have a wonderful husband, and a beautiful family of my own and I was living my lifelong dream. How could such different and starkly contrasted emotions exist inside me at the exact same time? I could be perfectly happy and content about one part of my life, and completely grief stricken about another… This was a revelation!
We need more words to express such phenomenon.
And yet, even as I write that, I realized that some emotions can never be adequately expressed through words. This is why I love music and art and dance so much. They express things of the soul. I also believe that some parts of life are not really meant to be captured in a full-on tangible way, and sometimes just need to be lived and actually experienced, and that by attempting to capture them in any other way almost cheapens them or makes them feel like a sacrilege. Kind of like how yes, it’s very important to take pictures of your family and the events you share in, but at a point, put down the camera and just live it. Capture the moment in all its richness and reality with your own senses, and not through a lens. (suddenly “lens” looks like it’s spelled wrong… is it? lol) I heard a song the other day, I think, that said something about how back in the good old days we made memories, we didn’t post them. I think we have lost even that from our culture – we don’t know how to just LIVE anymore. I am really considering actually getting a little camera to take with me so I can capture the most important things I want to have a picture of, but then just live my life rather than take a picture on my phone and almost instantly share it with everyone. This is my life, our lives, and not every moment needs to be shared with those outside of the moment.
I have kind of gone on a little bit of a tangent, or my train of thought has a bit of a zig-zagging track, but maybe something about this resonates with you.
It’s ok to feel more than one thing at a time.
You don’t always need a specific reason to feel a certain way.
It’s important to just live in life’s richness and complexity.
If you are ever happy, you can be happy! You have permission! Don’t feel like you don’t deserve happiness, like “what right have I to be happy when ___ is going on in my life or I goofed up here?” or whatever, or that being happy completely negates any struggle you are going through. It doesn’t. I wish I could get that better through my own head. You can enjoy feelings of happiness or contentment without feeling like everything about you or in your life is perfect or good enough. You are complex and can feel a plethora of things at the same moment and that is ok.
Anyway, just some thoughts about our crazy lives and the things we can’t fully explain. Just felt like sharing with you on this rainy day full of contemplation.