Do You Care Enough About You?

A few days ago, when I was taking stock of my life in the last year, I realized that I couldn’t really remember a lot of what happened. That’s kind of sad, considering that I made some really big achievements, last year. It should have meant a lot more to me. But it really doesn’t, considering I remember only, like, five good days out of the 365.

But what should be and what is are two very different things, and I don’t think that we really allow ourselves to process what is as much. We keep telling ourselves that our grief is not valid enough because there is someone out there in the world who has it worse than us. We bottle all that up because we have no place to let all of it out. As a result, we neglect our feelings to an extent where we feel so much, yet nothing, all at the same time. It’s not a very pretty feeling, I’ll tell you that.

You can feel bad about whatever isn’t working out for you. Who said it wasn’t valid to cry over a relationship that didn’t last too long, or that it wasn’t okay to cry because you simply broke down after weeks of holding it in? They’re all valid. Your feelings are all valid as long as you acknowledge that there will always be things that aren’t under your control but also there’s not much you can do about that. What you can do, though, is tend to your own wounds first before they fester into something worse.

Most things in life seem pretty enough on the surface, but there’s a whole can of worms waiting to be opened under that. It’s never as easy as it looks and we are in no position to tell anyone ‘how easy’ they ‘have it’, because you don’t know what lies under the surface, unless you’ve seen all of it up close. A lot of the time, people need to come to terms with their feelings on their own. All you can do is be there for those people in whatever way you can. It takes time to understand that it is okay to make our emotions our priority; some take more time to arrive at that point than the others, and that’s perfectly fine.

On the days when quite literally everyone around me tells that the things I feel are all in my head, I ask myself why that should mean any differently. If it’s all in my head, then does it not give me a perfectly valid reason to let myself heal from it? Does it not mean I should let myself be numb for sometime, as I do anything and everything it takes to feel better again? After all, isn’t that just a form of processing our own emotions?

It’s the 21st century and there is no dearth of studies disproving the notion that people who are emotional are weak. We shouldn’t stop people from feeling things simply because it makes us comfortable to watch them process their emotions; that’s between them and their emotions, and we’re nowhere near a factor in that equation. Emotions shouldn’t be synonymous to weakness. Everyone processes emotions in different ways. Some process theirs more strongly than others, and they’re all valid.

But have you ever given yourself the time to acknowledge and process everything that you’ve been holding back lately? It’s not my place to tell you what to do, but this is just a reminder that everything you feel is valid, and that you shouldn’t invalidate your emotions simply because others can have it worse.

What’s yours is yours, including your emotions and everything that comes with it.

If it matters to you enough, then it’s a good reason to feel about it.Xx

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Featured Image by Jackson David on Unsplash