[Emotion Series] Embracing our negative emotions

The fuel for our success is not hope, love, courage, or happiness.

“Pain and suffering is universal and cheap, but empathy seems like a privilege that only the humble can afford.” - Me, 1 January 2023

Okay, some context as to why I think embracing our negative emotions is vital. So if you know me or have my first post, you would know that I lost my Dad at age 15. Young or not, I’ll let you decide and judge but it left a huge mark on me. If you didn’t fit in the previous two categories, well, now you know.

What most people don’t know, and I never really mentioned, is that my mother was absent from my life a year after my Dad died. It’s a little tricky to explain why she just left but the gist of it is that she took everything my family had (or what’s left of it), left me with nothing and lost everything.

This essentially meant that I was left with nothing financially. I was pretty much alone with only a few friends (the rest were bullies pretending to be nice), and fewer family friends to help me out. Also, as an additional kicker to the face, a very important exam was months away (O levels for those who are aware and for those who aren’t, it’s touted at the exam that determines your future)

All this sounds tragic, I know, but I ain’t here for pity points so don’t worry about that.

The point is that I was struggling with grief, desperation, anxiety, loneliness, and a fuck ton of fear about what do to next since I had no money, how do I deal with what I’m feeling and more importantly, how the actual fuck do I survive?

Looking back now, I can’t even imagine how I made it through all that emotional salad bowl but it was rough. Just imagine, I was going through all those feelings and having that important exam coming right up, you know what everyone around me said? All my teachers, caretakers and surrounding adults said ‘Forget your grief, you can grief later after your exam is over’.

Okay, fine, it wasn’t that harsh but that was the general gist of it. Some did ask about my feelings and how I was coping, but that was more of a side question to assess my mental capabilities for the exam. Dick move, right? Whatever, I pushed on and bottled up everything, just so that they could get off my back.

This only worked for 2 weeks before I crashed. No one knew about this but I hid somewhere and just bawled my eyes out but I had to keep quiet because I didn’t want anyone to know I showed weakness.

Everything was shit until Mr Rethi came along. See, he was different from the other teachers in my school (I can’t remember what he taught, I believe it was history because I ended up attaching good memories of history to him, but it was his life lessons that stuck with me the most.) He was different in the sense that he knew how to direct my pain and anger outward, and he was the only teacher, no, mentor, that explicitly acknowledged my pain and suffering.

All he did was make me exercise. He would push my fat ass to run up four flights of stairs under a certain time limit, make me lift weights (I was pathetic at it by the way) and work all the other gym machines. He basically made me direct my anger and grief through physical release.

It sounds like a no-brainer, being outside and doing some exercise is a great way to relieve stress, maybe some anger here and there, but I was a measly 15-year-old with no one to tell me this, let alone to help me direct it. This is why I always saw him as my first mentor in life.

Yeah, it’s a bit of tough love honestly, but it was the only love I felt in those lonely few months, and I guess it was the kind that I desperately needed from someone who understood or at least could see what I was suffering with it. He never asked me to focus on my studies either, he just asked me to release my anger and even though I hated exercise, I still went to him.

It was one focal point of a moment while pushing myself that forever stuck with me. He simply said “Being in pain and being angry is not a bad thing if you use it as fuel. That’s why I’m pushing you, not punishing you. Now use it to lift the bloody thing.”

I lifted it with a lot of difficulties, but I did it anyways because it struck a cord in me. I have been suffering, yes, but I didn’t need to waste it. That phrase alone made me turn all my negative emotions into something meaningful and productive.

So shoutout to you Mr Rethi. You may not remember me but I surely remember you. Also, I loved your “radical” philosophy (not so radical now since I’m more attuned to their intricacies and nuances.)

Now, his lessons to me weren’t so clear-cut because once I graduated from that school, I spiralled. I wasn’t able to control my emotions the same way as I did back when I was with Mr Rethi. I essentially regressed up until a few years ago.

There was even a time when I suppressed these emotions to the point it backfired on me. I had essentially buried, forgotten and erased all that negativity but what I ended up doing was neglecting my emotions altogether, became cold, insulted my progress and forgotten my past achievements. I essentially became a really toxic pool of negativity by neglecting them.

Yes, I’m better now and I have learnt a lot during those times, even made me a bit of an odd thinker but I’ll deal with that. But some of the biggest retrospectives have allowed me to love, to live, to laugh, and most importantly, to learn, and sometimes to be a little fucked up and say “fuck it, let’s do the thing that makes me scared, angry, stress and/or sad”.

Here are some of them and how embracing them has made me “whole”, in a vague sense.

1. Griefing can be personal, but you can choose to do it alone or with someone.

   • Grief is incredibly difficult and complex to process, understand and even identify. Not everyone experiences it the same way and in turn, externalises it very differently.

   • This boils down to how we understand when and how grief happens. Remember, it’s an emotion that often encompasses a process, rather than an immediate or short reaction, of losing something or someone, which means that it can happen and start for many at an incredibly young age when a pet, loved one or thing gets removed from their lives so suddenly.

   • This is why we have tried to understand it through the 7 stages but even that can be complex to navigate in and of itself.

   • Even small changes in life events can trigger grief. So since it differs from person to person, it’s not easy for others to come in and help, making it a potentially personal and lonely experience. Yes, it can add to the wave of other emotions and this is where caution is needed.

   • Overcoming it is not straightforward either. Some people take shorter time while others take far longer than the rest, yet it doesn’t mean they are weak or special. We just have different coping mechanisms and therefore, we all develop very different, sometimes stark, methods of dealing with our pain and suffering.

   • Therefore, grief creates wounds that reflect our past traumas, our current struggles and our future battles. They are each our own but we do not need to make it a lonely journey.

   • Grief is a process that, I believe, is there to bridge and unite others to our pain. It is a common, uniting, shared pain that leads us to understand others. Thus, we are not going to be lonely because there is someone out there who feels you.

   • You just have to reach out and communicate your pain, and direct your anger into a drive, motivation or passion but not as an outlet of frustration.

   • If you are grieving, know that I understand parts of you and will always be open to listening.

2. Embracing and accepting the other, ‘ugly’ parts of you make you love yourself more.

   • Given the nature and environment of how we receive and digest information these days, we can all agree it’s pretty shallow. So shallow that we end up accepting and believing whatever is told to us in mere seconds without thinking twice about whether it’s correct, true, valid or healthy. Hence, this is why clickbait articles are so enticing when we don’t bother diving into the actual articles to verify the facts.

   • Thus, we have developed this very toxic culture of believing what we see and accepting what we should and should not be. This means that we have developed a very precise psyche of what kind of people we must be to be accepted, and this often involves the narrative that our anger and sadness are to be kept to ourselves, that we cannot trust anyone at all, and there is even a glorification of pain and suffering in work and life because it builds you up.

   • While I am advocating the fact that we should be accepting and embracing our pain, I am not advocating for the blind acceptance of it. You cannot just say “Yes, I will suffer in pain” without actually reflecting on it and ensuring that it does not harm yourself, and in turn, does not harm others.

   • Pain and suffering are like fuels, you cannot use them in their raw, untamed form or else you will just explode and do no good.

   • Therefore, you have to embrace it, which means you have to open up and reflect on what it is you are dealing with and how you can better handle it, and then accept that this is a part of you.

   • To be extra clear, I am not saying you should just deal with it and ‘accept’ that it is life. Not the same thing. I’m saying you have to reflect in order to love.

   • Once you realise that all that anger, sadness, pain, agony, whatever, is part of who you are and it makes up your identity, you have to own up to it and develop it so that it guides your more ‘positive’ emotions. You cannot enjoy the sweetness and love it if you don’t understand how bitter tastes.

   • You also have to remember, we are all different but we’re not ugly just because we have issues. Your struggles are legitimate, it’s valid and somewhere, someone acknowledges them. If they can, so can you.

3. Very good fuel and drive to push you.

   • Have you ever had that last-minute thing you had to do? Like an essay or a project, maybe some work stuff, and you’re so stressed that you focus all your attention and energy on completing it? That stress is your fuel. We utilise fairly well in certain doses to help us get shit done and it works.

   • I’m saying anger, sadness and fear have the same effect if used correctly. Again, the disclaimer here is that these emotions have to be “administered” with the correct dosage or else it’ll have no effect or would have too much effect that it will harm or cripple you.

Anger

• Let’s start with the obvious one, Anger. I’m very sure we’ve all been angry at someone for doing something we hate, or saying something we dislike. Could be a politician lying again, or our relatives saying we’ve gained a few pounds. The bottom line is that it pisses us off. So what should you do?

• Most people would weaponise that anger, often saying something back in retaliation (some would say it’s revenge and that the person deserves it), or escalate it into violence.

• Now, neither of the examples is right but they aren’t wrong either. Context matters. If someone has been destroying your self-esteem, you can use that anger and destroy them back, that would be easy and in some cases, justified. But I propose to use your anger to ‘one up’ them. Meaning, use that anger, that drive, to achieve something that would make them jealous or envy you. Go start a business, gain some muscle, learn a new skill or get better grades/promotion. Attain something using that anger and you start to appreciate your passions in life.

• Conversely, you can use that anger as a reminder of how words or actions make you feel, and you aim never to do the same thing as they did. I believe the world can benefit from having angry people avoid harmful or toxic behaviours.

Sadness

• Next, sadness. No one wants to be sad, it’s pretty bad fuel to do anything. Okay, so don’t be sad.

• That is the very oversimplified and derived form of my point. Sadness is important because it reminds us of what hurts us. We all have our own wounds and scars, and sadness is a reflection of that. It shows us what we are hurt by and potentially, what we need to focus on when we seek help.

• Remember, the world doesn’t revolve around you and your wounds, so you cannot escape from the fact that you will get hurt. So, just wrap it up and heal it on your own. Do what you must to ensure that you do not get overwhelmed by sadness.

• The scars will still exist, it might still hurt, and you could shed a tear or two, and that is totally okay. No one expects it to be perfect, and we still need to experience sadness to appreciate happiness.

Fear

• Lastly, Fear. This is the trickiest one to get right because it’s very easy to get consumed by it.

• Over the years, I’ve come to realise that fear often boils down to bad experiences from the past and/or the unknown (and what it can/cannot bring to you). For the first one, overcoming past fears is something similar to how we tackle anger and sadness, we have to unpack the trauma and see where the fear truly lies/ comes from. From there, it’s up to you how you want to handle it but if it’s something you want to avoid because it brings harm, then fear is already doing the job for you. If, however, fear is hindering you from achieving something bigger, then you have to realise that fear is the barrier and the fuel at the same time. Use that thought and say you have to overcome it. This is intricately tied to my next point on fear of the unknown.

• We don’t know what is coming, and that is why we hate change because it brings about the unknown. Similar to certain phobias or just everyday tasks and events, fear blocks us from moving because we don't know what is next.

• That’s normal, we’ve been programmed to do that. Hence, the whole concept of risk and how we understand the “risk to reward” calculations that we do in our heads

• But chances are, we’re doing the calculations wrong, just like how we view our past experiences or the unknown wrong. See, when you analyse fear as both the barrier and the fuel, you have to realise that fear is making the problem much bigger in your head. It is not that bad and if it is, it is only temporary.

• Surgery? You might die, sure, but when do you not die? Sky diving? Parachute failures are extremely rare and you don’t jump alone anyways. Judgement or gossip? Since when were you born to please others?

• It’s all about perspective. Once you understand that fear is much smaller, you use it to push yourself past it and see that it is indeed, very small.

To end it off, negative emotions are still a part of us and it makes us whole. It helps you understand the struggles of others to help you bring them up, not hammer them down because you have been through the same thing. Now, it would be extremely shit of you as a person to shun and overlook the issues and struggles of others just because you don’t understand them but nonetheless, I get you.

Not everyone has the luxury of being nice.