feeling deeply
curse? or blessing?
When I was six years old, I had a plastic headband I quite liked. It was the 2000s, and everyone was wearing one—mine was special. It had glittering flowers on it. I wore it everywhere. Unit one night, I was at an event, and I had a huge headache. I think, as I nodded off on my mother’s shoulder, it fell off without me realizing. I cried the whole night. My father was confused as to why I was crying as much as I was, so I buried my face into my pillow and pretended to sleep, but I continued to cry silently. My mother assured me that there would be another one she could buy me, but there wasn’t one. I never wore one again.
This might sound stupid to you, I understand. But as I’ve grown from child, to teenager, to not a very well-adjusted adult who is still in school, I’ve felt stupidly sensitive about things that needed no attention, and felt even more deeply about things that really did. I am twenty-five now, nearly twenty-six, and I am still sometimes sad about a boy I didn’t date when I was seventeen. I don’t really even remember what his face looks like or what his voice sounds like, but I am still sad about it.
During my early twenties I cut off a lot of friends and isolated myself away from the world. It was during the pandemic too, so I had more of an excuse to stay indoors and not socialize. I thought that this could be a good thing, that maybe, if I shut myself away from the world, its horrors wouldn’t find me. I hadn’t wanted to feel heartbreak again. I worked at my soulless corporate job, went home, slept, and then went back to work, did it all over again and again and again. Nothing hurt me so nothing bothered me so nothing happened to me.
It was a weird coping mechanism—to self-isolate and intellectualize—I could fool myself into thinking I had healed because I understood the things that had happened to me—but understanding and feeling are two entirely separate things and I had been running away from the latter for a really long time.
I spoke to my uncle for the first time in five years. I had held onto some anger over that time, and despite my mother protesting, I had told him off. And I saw him through the WhatsApp call, contemplating.
“You have anger within you. You are angry with me,” he said.
“I am angry with you.”
“I am sorry.”
And then he started to cry.
I didn’t know what to do then, as a grown man cried through the phone admitting to his failures and to his faults.
My aunt passed away a couple of weeks ago. She also felt things quite deeply. So when she was happy, she embodied it—when she was sad, she embodied that too. She could be both of those things at once.
Maybe feeling deeply just runs in my blood.
Emotions are expansive and exhaustive—it was childish of me to run.
In my early twenties, I was heartbroken more by friendship breakups in my early twenties than by men. I’m on good terms with everyone now, wishing them well from afar and smiling when I see photos they post—but in the heat of things, I thought pain would never pass. I held onto every sentence ex-friends had said in a fit of anger, mourned experiences that would never come. I felt like I was the only one who cared more, because I wore my heart on my sleeve and I did not care that people could tell that it was broken. But this was hot-headed of me to assume. I am more loved than I realize.
The level of pain matched the level of love that was present.
This was a concept that took a long time to digest—still does. Energy cannot be created or destroyed—merely converted from one form to another. Isn’t that what grief is? Love, alchemized?
Three years ago I watched a K-Drama called 2521, that reminded me of who I used to be. The main character, Na Hee Do, loved someone at 20, who she lost at 21. Throughout the drama, Na Hee Do says she wants to experience real heartbreak, and so she dates someone she doesn’t really like, and when she breaks up with him, she wonders why she doesn’t feel anything. Her future boyfriend explains that she has to experience real love in order to do so.
After watching, I prayed for something, that, in retrospect, was probably really stupid.
I wanted to experience real heartbreak, after experiencing real love.
I wanted to live, not just survive.
Getting what you want is really fucking funny in how unfair it turns out to be, sometimes.
I’ve made so many mistakes. I’ve met so many different people. I’ve done so many things younger me would’ve scoffed at and judged me for. I befriended people and fell out with people I never thought I would. I let in love in ways I didn’t before. It was really disorienting at first. It felt like I was seeing color again, after choosing to view everything in greyscale for the longest time. It was weird, what the world made me feel about myself.
I had said to He Who Shall Not Be Named, when we first met—
“I am a stupid woman who feels things too deeply.”
“We all have our quirks, dear,” he had replied—nearly two years ago now—two! How did someone I only knew for a year have this much of a lasting impact on me?
He has a part in everything I am becoming, everything I say, everything I write. It will never pass. It will never be like we never met, like I had wished it to be. It was cruel of me to say—I want it to be like we’ve never met—in the end. And then I go back and forth between remembering what he said and did to me and then I’m back at ground zero, hating him all over again.
He might be the first person I’ve ever hated.
It becomes too much for me sometimes.
My therapist told me, “It was a moment of connection that you felt with someone that isn’t here anymore. You don’t connect with people often, or easily. He was awful to you, yes, but you connected with him, and that was real. Some part of him was real, and that’s what hurts.”
This isn’t another essay about him. I’m getting tired of writing about Him, and you must be tired of reading about Him too. But I go back to my original point—the level of pain matched the level of love that was present.
For a long time I wanted a lot of things to be like it never happened. Wanted to scrub it clean from my brain. I wanted to be a more naive, inexperienced person if it meant I was more protected, less aware of the world and its evils. My mom asks me, “are you sad?” and sometimes, I tell her “no, I’m fine,” and sometimes I say, “I’m sad all of the time,” because I don’t have it in me to lie.
I watched Fleabag recently. I think there is a line in that show that is heavily underrated, even by the one who delivers it. Fleabag’s father walks off after he says, “I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.”
Maybe that is why it hurts. Maybe that is why I can’t let go. Somewhere, deep inside, I’ve created a home for the hurt. Made it a cup of tea. Grew used to the barrenness. I have no advice on how to say goodbye. I’ve always heard, “if you don’t like it here, then leave,” and I stayed.
As I say goodbye to one chapter of my life and hang in limbo before the next unfolds, I don’t have any bright ending to leave you with. I could tell you that my traumatic childhood shaped me into a person that has learned to overcome many obstacles but that feels falsely positive. I don’t want to lie. I am still hurting. I am still sad. I’m not the kind of person that has an instant glow up after a breakup. I’ll never be the person that measures up to society’s version of feeling and looking okay like it’s a product to be consumed. I have always felt too much and grief is serrating. My therapist thinks it is my sensitivity that makes me a good writer.
Wherever I am, I always want to be somewhere else. Always longing, yearning, mourning, rolling with emotions I never know how to express. I sit in my room at three in the morning wanting another conversation with a friend from ten years ago. One more bitter cup of coffee and this time, I have the answer to the question they asked me all those years ago. The question I didn’t have the answer to. This time I’ll return the high fives I’ve scoffed at and I’ll laugh at one more bad joke without pity. I’ll believe when another person tells me I’m beautiful and I won’t nitpick every little compliment I ever get.
It feels unfair that I wasn’t given a chance at life from the beginning. That I always had to survive, instead of live. I feel deeply angry for the child inside of me that never got to feel safe. For her, I read journal articles and textbooks on trauma and dysfunction and behavior and I feel unsettled when I can’t find I’m looking for. It revives the feeling of, you never had it easy, you still don’t have it easy, and she is still inside of me waiting and wanting to be free. My friends tell me I’ve been through a lot but that I’ve been so strong. I don’t want to be strong. I want to be okay. I want to feel safe. Nothing else matters to me.
There’s a line Bojack Horseman says in Season 6, when he is in rehab, “so the thing I keep thinking about is—was it worth it for Beverly to be happy for a little bit, even though it ended up sad? Or would it be better if the whole thing would have never happened?”
The thing that broke my heart made me feel more alive than I had in years. Is that why I chased it? Because it had a great capacity to destroy me?
This too shall pass, is something He used to tell me.
I think that’s a lie. Nothing has passed and everything is different now. It’ll be one year of no contact in a couple of weeks, and I still remember the last things he ever said to me like it was yesterday.
Maybe that’s the point. We exist and survive in spite of it all. Maybe because of it too.
I wish I had more insight to offer. I am still figuring it out as I go.
But no matter how deeply I believed that I wouldn’t make it out of something alive, I did. And the sun always rose the morning after I cried the entire night. I used to want to go back into the past and collect pieces of my heart that I gave away in hopes that it’d make me feel whole again. But that’s not how it works, is it? I have to keep living, even with the holes in my chest, so that sometimes, light might peek through.
