You may think you’re doing yourself a favor by shutting your emotions off, but the opposite is true. You do everything in your power to numb yourself, whether that’s grabbing that drink or going to the gym. You do anything—everything—just to run away from the self-destructive pain in your life. You finish off that vodka bottle just to forget every ounce of pain that you feel because vodka tastes better than heartbreak. You run that extra mile because sweat feels better than remembering how much you miss them. You work your ass off for your career because success is better than remembering everything that hurts. While you may think that this is for the best, the most dangerous emotions are those that you shut off. The most dangerous emotions are those that do everything to run away from.
The truth is, you’re not being brave or fearless by pretending you can’t feel your emotions. No matter how unattached you seem, being distant and emotionally unattached isn’t a sign of strength. Just because you don’t let yourself feel them doesn’t mean you’re invincible. In fact, it’s proof that you care more than you’re letting on. Why would you need to shut your feelings off if you were strong as you say you are?
The more you repress the hell out of your emotions, the uglier it’s going to get when you do feel them. Instead of healing, you’re shutting off your emotions with the hope that they’ll eventually go away, but that’s never going to happen. As long as you keep running away from what you feel, you’ll never heal from every traumatic thing that broke you in the past. Facing your emotions may be the hardest and most frustrating thing you can do, but that’s the only way you can let go of your baggage.
Repressing your emotions doesn’t make you strong—it makes you weak. You carry this burden and it keeps getting heavier until one day, you just explode in the ugliest way possible. By refusing to feel everything, you’re just surviving through your emotions instead of living through them, and this is the darkest way to live.
Published by: Thought Catalog
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