Or any time you feel overwhelmed by your own emotions.
When I was in college, I had a lot of feelings.
This, of course, is also true today.
But when I was in college…
Wow.
I had a lot of feelings and very very few coping mechanisms for dealing with them.
I remember feeling a LOT about a very bad break up in particular.
It was real bad.
My longtime friends, including the person the break up was with, know exactly what I’m talking about. **
(Sorry dude, for real.)
I cried a lot. Like a lot a lot. To everyone. And everywhere. This was because:
I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings.
I didn’t even really know that I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings, at the time.
Does anybody, with their first big heartbreak?
One place I cried in particular: Katie ‘s dorm room.
I remember thinking while crying there in late February, the worst month, about how she was a good friend.
Also, I remember she had made these triangles out of tape all over the room and thinking “wow, Katie is so sophisticated.”
Both of these things are true today!
But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about in this email.
Instead, I wanted to tell you something Katie told me that day, that I’ve thought about… probably once a week since then.
I’ve seen it in a couple of different “self-help/leadership/emotional resilience” type books, but never in quite the same way.
What she said helped me more than anything in my lifelong search for “handling your emotions” tools.
Around death, illness, addiction, bad relationships, at the end of bad relationships.
And of course -
During the pandemic.
So here’s what Katie* told me while I was bawling on her dorm room floor in her sophisticated triangle decorated room:
“Grief, grieving anything, is like you’re climbing up a spiral.”
“On one side is all of the pain and all the feelings, and on the other side, there’s acceptance.
When you climb the spiral, you’re always going to end up back on the side that has all of the pain and the feelings.
It’s going to feel like you’re going backwards, like there’s something wrong with you.
But you’re not going backward.
It’s going to happen over and over again, but that’s OK, because each time it does the pain is a little bit shorter.
Eventually, you’re at the top, and maybe you feel some pain sometimes, but it’s not a part of your life anymore.
You’re at the top.
Something different happens now.”
I don’t know how you are feeling as the year anniversary of the pandemic approaches (sorry. But it’s coming).
I don’t know how you feel as the many other things part of your pandemic experience are brought up around this shitty anniversary.
But.
I hope you keep climbing.
** we’re v close friends now blah blah blah repair blah blah blah friendship and conflict — but that’s a whole different meandering post.
* Katie says she got this from her therapist at the time, so it’s folklore.
Originally published at https://notesonfeednet.substack.com.
