I am an emotional mess. Almost no one around me knows this. I did my best to pretend to always appear as if my mood and feelings are under my control. I look calm and always use reasoning. People in my close circle, even parents, relatives and best friends would say that I am the most calm person they ever met. The amount of energy that I had to spend to create and support this image was a mystery to me.

But why do I need to pretend? Who told me that it is bad to be emotional? When did it happened and why did I believe it?

I saw someone writing: “I can’t stop reacting to things! Everything effects me!” I would say this is one of the biggest misconception in the world. Thinking that we have to stop feeling our feelings. When a toddler cries and mommy feels a bit overwhelmed and says to them: “Stop crying, we are going to be late!” The message that the child heard is: “Your feelings are a burden, stop feeling them as soon as you can.” How many times in our life time did we experience this? But the reality is we are sensitive creatures. Our sense organs and feeling were not given to us by accident. We do have them. And it would be ridiculous to tell a dog to stop wagging it’s tail when the dog is happy, in a same way it is ridiculous to tell a sensitive create to stop be sensitive. The amount of will power that we direct into pushing our feelings away is huge. But the more we push them down, the more they want to fight us back and become stronger. This is when we start using drugs, alcohol and other ways of numbing ourselves.

When we learn that our feelings are not our enemies, when we accept them and become curious about their nature, we can transform not only they way we react, but also we can transform our whole existence.