Running & Crying: Reflections on Emotions
This morning I discovered that a treasured item had been irreparably damaged. When my dad died in 2017, I was in my 2nd year of teaching. He was diagnosed with cancer just prior to me starting that job in 2016, and he had surgery the day I started work. Your first year in academia is rumored to be brutal; this is absolutely true. Some students are unkind just because you’re new (to be fair, some are unendingly kind for the same reason), you are torn apart mercilessly in evaluations (which, by the way, are biased), you’re managing multiple new preps or adaptations from courses in various stages of preparation when they were handed to you (often just a week before classes start), and you’re simply trying to not drown. On top of this, I had layered: watching the man I had always known to be strong and capable waste away to a thin, weak, bed-ridden shell of the person I had always known him to be; an divorce and unexpected custody fight; the loss of my furry companion of 17 years; and a move to a new place with no support systems. That sets a hell of a stage.
My Dad was not perfect. Who is?However, he was funny and learning to be very tender with his grandchildren, as you can see in the pictures here, in one of which he’s pretending to be asleep with my child’s stuffed animal. I loved getting to see him be a person he was never able to with me. Dad died on Thanksgiving Day in 2017. I will never forget sitting on the floor of my grandparents’ home in PA sobbing. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye and that I’d left him. It was like he waited until he got placed in Hospice residentially and that was it. Returning to work was unbearable. I was sad and overwhelmed and had to keep going. But in the weeks that followed there were (what probably seemed to them) small kindnesses that felt huge to me. One of those was a basket of items that my internship class put together for me. While it contained many things, two things stood out to me the most, a mug from the store next to my favorite coffee shop and a scarf knitted during our class’s hours of seeing clients and doing supervision. They were things that expressed care in a way I cannot even put into words. Generally, I don’t worry too much about stuff. I lost most of it during my divorce and had to come to terms with the fact that losing stuff doesn’t mean we lose memories and connections. But this mug and scarf are deeply treasured.
This morning I noticed a large chip in the mug. Overwhelmed, I felt myself just shut down. My cognitive brain went completely offline. I legit couldn’t talk. I’m a runner, so I hooked up the pup, grabbed my tunes, and headed out. During the run I cried. For those of you who don’t run, running and crying is really freaking hard. I am not the world’s best runner, so maybe you more skilled runners can run and cry. I thought I might die, but I pushed through. I have committed to run one mile a day for as long as possible, and dammit, I was doing it. But I thought to myself, as I ran, of the metaphor of running and crying.
As a society we’ve become so disconnected and scared of emotions. We push though and push down. We don’t connect. We don’t get curious. We don’t think we can handle the feelings. We “run” through them. I talk with clients about this all the time. We talk about how they layer shame for feeling the way they do on top of their basic emotion they’re feeling or how they push their feelings down and disconnect from a basic human experience. Many of my clients, some due to trauma, others to simple socialization, don’t believe they can simply feel their feelings, use them as information to determine their actions, and move through them. But that’s what feelings are, information. Anger in its truest form, tells us something is not right in how we are being treated or some other way, though for some folx it can mask more vulnerably experienced feelings like fear or hurt; sadness means we need care and connection, we need to stop and offer ourselves compassion; overwhelmed does not mean we are failing, it means there’s too much on the plate of life. Feelings are simply information we can use to make decisions on what we do. What if we paused, let ourselves feel, and got curious about what was going on?
This morning I needed a run. I was also really angry and totally dysregulated. My grief over the loss of my dad was welling up, like it still sometimes does, even 5+ years later. My thinking brain was WAY offline. Running was my self-care and self-compassion. Maybe it’s yours. But are you “running and crying”? Cause it’s hard. Are you “running” through your feelings when you could stop and care for yourself? Are you “running” through your feelings when they are telling you to take action? How could you slow down, stop “running,” and get curious today?
