I’ve never been good at controlling my emotions. I feel things too strongly and too deeply, through my entire body. It’s a flush of heat in my face, a shakiness in my hands and feet. It’s a constricted throat; an urge to pace. These physiological reactions are accompanied, usually, by guilt. When something scares me, my first response is to wonder what I did wrong to make it happen. From tiny things — forgetting to turn in paperwork for my daughter’s camp — to major things, like today’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, I’m sweaty and shaky like I’m coming down from a terrible drug and I’m thinking, “Why couldn’t I have done better? Why couldn’t I have stopped this?”
Guilt, on top of the shaky sweats, is a toxic combination for me. I am caged, and all I want to do is escape. All I want is for it to be over. To somehow move on from the feeling and make it all go away.
I hate this about myself. I wish for control, and measured responses. I wish for perspective: I am but one woman in the world. I’m not culpable, and I’m not more than I am. And, I wish that I could breathe through my emotions. I wish to digest bad news like it is warm oatmeal. I wish to hear assurances that everything will be okay and I want to believe them, but I can’t. I’m nearly forty years old. I’m not changing this fundamental part of myself.
This morning, Shawn and I went on a long run, through the humid but cool, sweet-smelling forests of Rock Creek Park, and my brain wandered pleasantly, as it does on runs. I thought about the novel I’m working on, just beginning, really; I thought about the novel I’m hoping to sell; I thought about the Supreme Court’s bad decision yesterday on guns. I even had an optimistic thought that the Congress was finally doing the right thing on guns.
Then, the flood. As we stopped in front of our house, Shawn pulled out his phone, looked at the screen, and said, “They did it. They overturned Roe, and it’s just like we thought.”
As usual, I wanted to be a different person. I wanted to defend myself from the battering of emotions. I wanted to be able to think of how this would impact millions of women, of families, of how it might have affected me, when I had an ectopic pregnancy and needed a chemical abortion in order not to die (which, in some states, will now be an outlawed termination), without feeling like someone was ripping my heart out of my chest.
But no matter what, I can’t stop what I feel. I feel rage, and sorrow, and a keen sense that having six out-of-touch conservatives decide the fate of millions is anti-democratic. So now, I do what I find helps me, and I try to do it without judgment: I feel, and I write.
If you’re reading this, and you can relate, I want to say to you, and to the little nub of myself that is capable of hearing it: Your feelings are okay. Do what you need to do with them. Write them down, scream them out, roll them up in an old carpet and throw them in the dump, then make yourself a cupcake, because we need your oar in the long, beautiful, bitter river that is existence. Love yourself.