Sadness, or Hanger?
I'm at a stage where I can notice my feelings, and I'm practising not doing anything about them. Not eating them away, not drowning them out with a show, just letting them be. Last night gave me the chance to test this out:
My partner said he was going to go to the cinema. I had felt sad all day and I was looking forward to seeing him, in the hopes he could help me forget my sadness, especially as I didn’t understand what it was about. Then he reminded me he would be out. No worries, I said to him, it will be nice to have alone time and hopefully to journal rather than drown out my feelings with a TV show. He left me some dinner for when I would get home. The sadness was still present, and I felt excited for an evening to myself.
As I neared the end of my train journey, it suddenly dawned on me to check for my keys. I switched off the podcast I was listening to so I could see better and I searched, as calmly as I could, and found nothing. No keys, and the sadness hummed a little louder.
I messaged my partner, what’s the code for the lock box? Although I moved in with him several months ago now, neither of us had thought to give me the code. I messaged again, in the hope that he would read his messages in the cinema. But he’d already commented on how busy the cinema was, so I knew my hopes were in vain. A distant memory came to me that he’d told me the code was my birthday. I got off the train, my spirits lifted again as I walked home. I tried all the variations of my birthday and even his birthday, worried the neighbours would think I was a burglar, and nothing worked. The sadness I’d been feeling all day resurfaced, tears filled my eyes.
Old Me’s self-hatred tried to pipe up: ‘if he really loved you, he’d have given you the code’; ‘the cat-sitter knows the code but you don’t’. Present Me breathed deeply and thought, ‘my dinner is on the other side of that locked door, so let’s walk to the burger place, listen to the podcast and ask my partner to pick me up from there as it’s on his way home’. And that’s what I did.
Did I walk off my feelings? Did I bite into that burger and swallow my feelings? Did the podcast distract me from my feelings? For me, it’s difficult to know for sure: it was gone 9pm, I’d had a long day, my commute is a long one, I was definitely hungry. I wasn’t sure whether the sadness was sadness, perhaps some of it was hanger! Reading this piece back, it blows my mind how many feelings I can feel in the space of a couple of hours. Some are for sure evoked by external factors like a podcast and some I notice come from nowhere with no instructions on what they’re about. I name what I can, and leave the others alone.
Nothing happened when he picked me up. Old Me would have fallen apart, got angry with him, held him responsible for my unhappiness. Present Me had self-regulated, and the only casualty of the evening was the home-cooked dinner. I still don't know whether I swallowed my feelings with that burger, but I know I didn't hand them to my partner.
