Have you ever felt flat? Bored? Empty?
Even if you’ve only felt this way for a day, or a week, or longer, you know that this can be a pretty terrible state of affairs. I’ve known people who when faced with this experience have gone to extreme measures to feel anything. Personally I tend to isolate and retreat even more, which has a funny way of building even deeper feelings of emptiness. There is some sense that something different is possible but in the face of not knowing, change can feel really hopeless. Which leads to more flatness, which can culminate into truly miserable moments of existing.
It sucks.
And it doesn’t have to be this way. The tricky, and for me frustrating, thing about emotions is you can’t have one without the others. When I was in the deepest parts of my own depression (looking at you end of college), I didn’t really let myself feel anything. It sounds a little crazy, and in today’s society this is easier to achieve than it has ever been before.
I spent countless hours pouring myself into video games, getting lost on the internet, smoking weed to immediately fill any unstructured time in my schedule. I allowed myself only predictable and reliable emotional experiences; simple distraction, short-term focus, novelty which entailed no risk or vulnerability on my part. In short, I was being very controlling with my emotions. There was no time for sadness. No time for emptiness. Instead I just kept running, trying to put as much distance between me and the empty feelings as possible.
Yet I never seemed to gain any ground.
The emptiness was always there, right at my heels, and I was convinced I needed to do something to get rid of it completely. If only I could defeat this terrible menace, then surely I would find joy, connection, and inspiration again.
Unfortunately, that’s not how any of this works.
The first time I went to therapy, I laid out this whole experience. I shared about how I was stuck, how I was frustrated, how I thought it would never change, and how the things in my life gave me little satisfaction and yet I didn’t seem capable of changing any of it. I cried.
I cried a lot.
And in the midst of all that crying, my therapist asked me to do something remarkable. She asked me to feel my heart, and I was dumbstruck. I felt alive. My whole body seemed to be pulsing, and my heart seemed to shine like a beacon in my chest. I was expansive, and wonderful, and so relieved to discover a sense of capability and inspiration. It was a kind of miraculous 180, and at the time I wasn’t exactly sure how it happened.
Brené Brown has an excellent talk on her research into this exact phenomenon. By protecting myself from my pain, my desperation, my sense of empty; I wasn’t allowing myself to feel anything else. I had accumulated some pain and some disappointment.
My emotional cup had filled with difficult things, and rather than take the time to really experience them and move on, I threw out my aliveness along with my numbness.
By denying my struggle, I denied myself everything else.
And I still tune out sometimes. I am by no means an enlightened guru, who tackles every emotional experience as it comes. Yet I’ve also come to be much better at allowing myself to feel. I can recognize the need for it more than ever before, and have been fortunate enough to build a community and practices that help me to tune in to me.
How about you?
How often do you focus on what you are feeling versus being focused on something else? It really doesn’t take much to give yourself a little bit of this time. It can be as simple as choosing to silence rather than listening to music while you drive. You might try taking five minutes after you finish something to just sit and sense into yourself, before immediately heading off to do the next thing.
I’ve found that the ability to feel myself takes on whole new levels of vividness when I take the risk to share with another person. It almost always feels risky, even with my closest friends, and yet the rewards of feeling a full and vibrant life are invaluable. If you need help, ask for it. If you’re feeling flat take the risk of feeling right into the flatness. You might be surprised at what you find waiting there right alongside it.
