When Did You Learn That Emotions Are Something to Fix?

A meditation on unlearning emotional suppression.

Somewhere along the way,

you were taught to fear your own depths.

To believe that if a feeling rose within you

a sorrow, a longing, a sudden tide of anger or grief

your job was to manage it.

To shrink it.

To solve it.

To make it go away.

You were told that calm is control,

and that control is strength.

That tears are best saved for private rooms if at all.

That joy must be appropriate,

and grief must be brief.

But let me ask you:

When did you learn that emotions are something to fix?

And who might you become

if you no longer believed that?

---