Pulls up a chair, takes a sip, looks around blinks, and sips again. “Hello”, I say nodding slightly and looking about the room. This Tuesday, and likely the next, I’m inviting readers to talk openly and honestly about- gulps -emotions. Fear not, I’ll get the bawl…er, I mean ball rolling.
In most of what I can remember about my 13 days shy of 37 years on the planet, I have struggled with, not my emotions necessarily, but outward responses to my emotions. Moreover, what I’ve felt most debilitating is my own perceived failure to express these emotions in ways that fit in with my other “checked boxes”: granddaughter, daughter, friend, sister, woman, wife, mother and business professional, respectively. Whilst these boxes make up the wonder that is me- and, I suspect many of you-there is no one right way in which to be honestly and most expressively present in all of these “places” yet grounded emotionally, in the heart’s center.
Last week, or perhaps it’s been two weeks now, I had an outburst. I was so angry with a service representative’s level of incompetence that I was driven to tears. Rewind, read: “I was so ashamed of the anger I felt towards this person’s incidental incompetence that I became disappointed in myself and most terribly saddened.” There I sat, at my desk, both stirred and shaken with what felt like boiling tears racing down my weary face. I was pissed all the way off, but I had no “place” to put it. Surely she didn’t mean to be incompetent, and further, none of my assigned boxes support the way I was feeling. The children were peacefully going about their day in their rooms, as was my husband. Surely, the representative has a set of “checked boxes” of her own-which probably contributed in some small if not major way to her slipshod and unfocused work. My neck bent further, my shoulders lost their integrity, and the tears came faster.
Shortly thereafter- too damn shortly- my wonderful, albeit 100% man speaking husband walked in and asked, “Why do you get so angry…” I’m sure he said something else, but by that time I was in full on every-word-I’ve-ever-read-on-a-bathroom-stall histrionics served up like only Tameka does, loudly. Arrrgh! I became even more incensed. Read: “I was so hurt that he kicked me while I was down, as if my own shame wasn’t enough. He reminded me that I was acting outside of the boxes.” Hell, after all of the things I said, surely he questioned whether he’s once even seen a check in the sane box!
I can’t tell you, the last time anyone came racing to see what I was laughing so heartily about, what I was beaming with pride about, or what had broken my heart-but anger, rage, wrath, ire-now that gets people’s attention. It stirs their curiosity, it piques their interest. It piques mine too; I wonder, if like a train wreck, it does so because deep inside we know full well, given the right (well, wrong) set of circumstances it could be us, them-it could be you: overcome and out of control, mangled by the strangehold of weighty, intense emotion. Do you live in fear and/or shame of your emotions? If so, which ones?
