There’s a tool I developed early on that served me well for a long time. Whenever something affected me, I would dismiss the emotion that was attached to it.
After a while, that tool became reflexive, and felt mighty useful because I could shrug off anything that bothered me. In fact, there was a manliness to it that I came to take pride in. College peers came to recognize it too, e.g. “Wow, he’s so serious and stoic. Nothing fazes him.”
As I got older, that tool started to lose its effectiveness. Dismissed emotions began resurfacing with increased ferocity. I spent more time revisiting past events, and the sense that my internal life was built on a house of cards grew stronger.
There were people I came across during this time of insecurity who offered a glimpse into what identifying and processing emotions meant; a seed was planted.
Nowadays, I find myself increasingly trying to sit with uncomfortable emotions, but it took years to get to this point. In the early stages, I would recall a painful event from my life, feel a twinge of sadness for the way it had altered my trajectory, and then I would immediately stop myself from inhabiting the feeling. To truly sit with the feeling felt performative. I felt like a fraud.
Why are you vying for attention? You’ve had privileges others can only dream about. Don’t forget how lucky and privileged you are, you fucking dumbass. Things could be way worse. You know who talks about emotions? People who can’t deal. Pussies.
And what I have arrived at more recently is a distinction between emotional resilience and emotional invalidation.
Resilience means being able to acknowledge that something hurt, carry that knowledge, and continue living your life.
Invalidation means insisting that it shouldn’t have hurt in the first place, and the consequence is that a part of you stays frozen in that moment, unprocessed.