The Fragility of Humans

I’d be lying if I told you the last few weeks have been the easiest few weeks of my life. And over these past few weeks, I have felt the raw forms of an assortment of different emotions, some of which I think don’t even have a name.

With everything I have been dealing with, it has felt sometimes like my brain has gone haywire. Suddenly your mind is like a kamikaze pilot, a martyr desperate to prove themselves; your mind turns on itself like a cancer, poisoning every thought to the point where you feel like your eating yourself alive, where you almost seem to relish in the sadness and the anger and the guilt. You are a turncoat, a traitor, your own Judas, your own worst enemy.

There will come times in your life where you feel profound and deep emotion. Pure ecstasy, yes, but also anger that boils your blood so much you might be ashamed of it, and pain so deep it not only surprises you, but numbs you to the core. I guarantee if you haven’t already felt emotions that amaze you by how exceedingly powerful they are, that astonish you because you didn’t know you could even feel that much, it will happen. That is the human experience: there’s no need to be scared by it, because it’s a beautiful thing, really, that we can feel something as pure as emotions.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently, on this idea of emotions, on happiness and sadness. My sophomore year of high school, I struggled a lot with self-confidence and self-image issues. It was an unhappiness I didn’t quite understand, and, much like the unhappiness I mentioned above, it was a dangerous sadness that turned my mind on myself. I often wondered to myself, if happiness was a choice (a statement I now only believe up to a certain extent), why couldn’t I just be happy.

One day I mustered up the courage to confide in a friend that, “No, I actually was not okay.” This was a turning point; I confessed my feelings, expressed my insecurities, and I finally felt free. I had found the path towards happiness and chose it. And it was a rocky road that would take time to walk along, but it didn’t matter because I had come to a fork in the road between happiness and sadness and I had chosen the “right” one.

Ironically, four years later, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I found myself facing a somewhat similar problem once again: here I was, fighting this wave of sadness, all the while saying to myself, why can’t I just be happy.

It might have been because four years ago, I was younger and my emotions were less complicated. Now that I was older, the emotions I was dealing with were more complex, and thus, something I needed to deal with again when I was more mature (a theory I would like to mention, but I personally seriously doubt).

Yes, the complexity of emotions cannot be argued against, but I don’t think this complexity is something that develops over time. Emotions have always been complex and my age has nothing to do with it. When I had dealt with my sadness at 16 years-old, it had been just as complex as the emotions I felt now as a 20-year old woman.

There are two main things I’ve learned so far during this part of my life.

One. There is nothing romantic about sadness. Yes the films and the media, books and stories, they all portray a one-faceted light of what it’s like to suffer; what it’s like to cry and learn, forgive, forget and move-on. But something as complicated as the emotions of a real, breathing, honest-to-god human being, cannot be summed with a movie montage, a clip of our hero having an “a-ha” moment in a thunder-storm, and a quick, happy ending tied up in a red bow.

I don’t want to discredit works of art of this sort: many times these works are based on people’s real life emotions and growing experiences. Thus, they can be important tools for understanding, healing, and learning. There are so many movies and novels that have touched me down to my core, that do, and continue to, inspire and conjure up feelings inside me. But even the most well-executed piece of theatrical production, or the most poignant book, can not completely capture real, raw emotions in the light that they are truly felt.

There is nothing romantic about disease, depression, eating disorders, or self-image issues. There is nothing magical about crying for a loved one you still hope one day will come running through that door again, or learning how to grieve over a broken heart while wondering what it will mean if they choose to never return back. The only thing waiting for a cancer diagnosis is, is scary as all hell.

These are all very real emotions, felt by very real people every single day. They show just how beautiful and absolutely fucking terrible emotions can really be. They are actual problems/feelings that can’t be fixed by simply finding the “right” path and “choosing” to be happy.

Which brings me to my second point.

Two. Anger and happiness, guilt and sadness, and all the feelings in between, all are messy and frustrating. They are unfathomable and simple at the same time. Life is all a huge convoluted, tangled mess that you will spend the rest of your life trying to figure out.

When I was in high school, I mentioned that I had felt like I came to a fork in the road: happy versus sad. And that dealing with my emotions, and learning from them, led me to pick the path for “happiness”.

When you’re faced with sadness, you feel like it has consumed your life; you are dejected, depressed, you are sad. And the same can go for happiness as well; you feel bright and warm and ecstatic, so when you hit that bump of sadness, you’re left wondering, “What happened? I was so happy”.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize. These past few months, I’ve dealt with the worst pain I ever could have imagined (dismal, I know, but it’ll get more cheery). It has left me breathless, confused, dazed, like a visitor in my own body: I don’t wish it on anyone. But the funny thing is, I can sit here and acknowledge that, yes, this is the deepest pain I’ve ever felt in my whole life, I know that. But still, through it all, there are flickers, sparkles and glimmers of happiness.

In the workout I just killed that I could barely finish a month ago, in leaving the office to grab Chipotle with good company and now, good friends. In cracking up and (yes, even shedding tears) to a horribly, wonderful TV show called The Bachelorette. In half crying, half-laughing with my friend on the phone as he told me lines that sounded like they came straight out of a John Green novel (I kid you not, that kid is a genius). From the guy at the gym who told a shrimp like me I was “amazing”, to the humor of a group of girls who were still able to support their tipsy friend who was all the way in Mexico, I felt happiness. And for 3 minutes and 21 seconds, while I sang along to every word of The Spins by Mac Miller, while driving with my windows down along the Long Island coast next to my best friend, I felt euphoric.

Before, I said that I only believed happiness was a choice up to a certain extent.

Sometimes, I think we do get lost in this idea of the “romanticism” of sadness: for some reason some of us can fall into this trap where we relish this sadness and soak in our misery. This is the choice part, when you choose to foster this sorrow and give in to this idea of a “glamorous” sadness.

The choice lies in either cultivating this sadness, or accepting it. Because you sure as hell can’t choose to not feel sad. Sadness happens. For some people, it’s harder than others. But don’t you dare ever tell someone to just be happy.

Happiness, sadness, fear, jealousy: emotions are not states of being. There are no paths or roads, or even choices sometimes. Your feelings do not define you. You are not happy. You are not sad. You are unapologetically you. You are you who feels things in a way unique to all other people and every day you will feel hundreds of different, unique combinations of emotions.

As for me? I am strong, with an even stronger support system behind me. I can be happy when I am sad or angry or hurt. And, if I’m going to be completely honest, I’m really fucking scared. But I’d rather feel all of these things, than nothing at all.

I just want to leave you with the last line of a short story I wrote when I was a senior in high school. It was a story about heartbreak, something I didn’t truly understand at the time, but recently, it has come to mean a lot more to me.

The message I was trying to get across at the time was the idea that pain hurts, it hurts like hell, but the fact that you feel such strong pain, is because you care so much. Because the fact that you feel such strong emotion is because you are human, and that’s what’s beautiful about you.

“The fragility of humans cannot be denied, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”