Emotions...

For a long time, I was an expert at suppressing my emotions, not allowing myself to feel them, or outwardly pretending I felt nothing at all. It was to protect myself from painful feelings. Put up the walls, pretend nothing's happening, and maybe, just maybe, you won't feel it.

Eventually, there came a time when I started to realize how wrong this was. How emotions are part of what makes us human, and how feeling them, be them good or bad, is part of the richness of the human experience. It was hard to change. Actually, it's still hard. I'm still tempted to suppress everything bad, and "not feel it." But lately, I've sort of embraced it. Allowed myself to feel sad and even cry if I needed to. And you know what? It was liberating.

Today was one of those days.

I logged on to an old email account, one that I haven't used in years, because it's been invaded by spammers. What isn't my surprise, when I see one lost little email in the middle of 500 spam messages, from someone I haven't seen in years, and which actually contained a couple of pictures. Tears immediately sprang to my eyes. My automatic response immediately tried to suppress them. I stopped it, and allowed the tears to flow. I answered the email, tears still in my eyes, and said some things that I should have said 20 years ago. Yes, I've been suppressing those tears for 20 years. That's a long time...

Nobody wants to hurt. Nobody likes to cry. But what we don't realize is that those tears, that pain, is not going to go away unless you feel it. Unless you look it in the face and accept it, feel it, and then, put it away.

Sometimes a good cry is just what the doctor ordered...