Emotional Recognition

There was a time in my life where there were rarely any good moments in my day. 

I used to wake up sad, exist sad and go to bed sad. Any good thing was still so overshadowed by the feeling of being sad. This sad used to be a good day. On a good day I would wake up sad, exist sad and go to bed sad. When days were worse I just wouldn't wake up, I wouldn't exist and there would be no reason to get back into bed because I probably never left. Sometimes I emotionally was at home even if I physically was somewhere else. On a lot of the bad days, the feeling was rock bottom melancholy which involved just listening to mayday parades terrible things on repeat until I was able to fall back to sleep. 

But it was to the point that the sadness just truly felt like nothing. I knew it was sadness, but it was sadness to the extent where it just felt like I was feeling nothing. Any feeling felt like sadness but sadness just felt like nothing.

When everything started to get better, I was able to start to properly feel again. One of the most prominent things to me when everything started to get better was that I was actually able to feel other things again. Eventually happiness actually felt like happiness, anger started to feel like anger and more importantly, sadness truly felt like sadness. When I was having a rough day, I truly felt it. I felt it at different intensities, for different amounts of time, and even felt different things at once. I almost forgot that I was able to feel both sad and happy at the same time, that I didn't even have to feel anything and that was okay.

Whilst this to some may not sound like the biggest thing in the world, it truly was one of the most important things that ever happened to me in my pursuit of better mental health. When I was able to feel different emotions, I was able to easier grasp what made me feel these things and then prioritise the things that made me feel better things. Making people laugh made me feel good, so I tried to be funnier. Exercise and sport made me feel energised and happy so I threw myself properly into sports again and focused on that. Similarly, I could start to understand what, even if temporarily, made me unhappy. At one point, the things that used to make me happy started making me feel anxious so I stopped doing them, and that made me feel better. I learnt slowly how to balance my feelings, how to push through things that I had to do that stressed me out and balance it with what made me happier. 

Throughout the last 12 years of my life I have experienced so much that have affected me. They didn't stop because of any of this. If anything, a lot of these elevated and the sadness grew into other things. Anxiety felt like nothing but now it feels like everything. When I have bad days, I often feel them ten times worse than anything I used to feel. But none of this takes away how much being able to feel gave back to my life. With each day my ability to recognise and accept my emotions continues to develop and I am getting better at it each day. 

In my life now, even though there are days where there are rarely good moments, there are so many more days that the good is there.