By Yamila García
I blocked my emotions, and that’s why this post is taking me longer than usual. When my emotions are raw, writing becomes an extension of them—something that almost comes naturally, a new habit and a new way of channeling what happens inside me through words. It’s been new since I started writing for Include and discovered its therapeutic effect. I realized that what I often couldn’t express verbally, I could let out in writing. However, when writing, talking, and anything else aren’t enough to manage my emotions, I sometimes end up shutting down—turning off those emotions that make me so uncomfortable. I have this false feeling of being able to continue “functioning,” but the cost is high.
When everything feels impossible to handle, and I find myself drowning in emotions I don’t know how to deal with, I completely disconnect from what I feel. I uproot what I can’t modify and continue functioning in a kind of “power-saving” mode. However, as with electronic devices, the “power-saving” mode implies losing capabilities. I “function” and do what I have to do, but deep beneath the surface, a storm is raging that I have tried to contain with a Band-Aid. Of course, whenever emotions remain in the background and are not channeled in a healthy way, they magnify and seem to agree to come together, destroying everything in their path as a form of protest for having been ignored. They unleash an explosion that, in opposition to the “power-saving” mode, consumes every last drop of energy in minutes.
I’m trying to learn to reconnect before the chaos. Writing helps me. I may not be able to talk about what I feel yet, but I can talk about what I know I’m doing. I know that I am hiding from my own emotions and that I want to learn to navigate them differently. I don’t believe in magic solutions, but I do know that when I manage to reconnect this time, nothing will be the same. I am close to achieving something that I have dreamed of all my life, and while for others, it may not be so big, my life took many turns before reaching this point. I wrote this last sentence two days after I wrote the rest of this post.