Feeling all the feels

I am a deeply feeling person. We cancers are known for our deeply sensitive natures and being ruled by our emotions. My doctoral office mate referred to it as my “marshmallow heart” and seemed to caution me—though not using those exact words—that it would get me in trouble because I feel too much.

That is probably true.

It makes me kind and empathetic and compassionate.

It also causes me a lot of pain.

I care too much; I get hurt.

I would make a good psychologist in that I am interested in humans and their behaviors immensely, and I also would not be able to draw clear emotional boundaries. Because I’ve thought about it—doing trauma-focused psychology. I know myself and how much I care about a student who dumps on me, perhaps inappropriately, and I carry their stories and troubles with me. And that is a few minute interchange or an email, not an hour-long session on their past traumas and deep struggles.

In life, I know that we need to feel all the feelings, even the very hard ones. That it is truly the only way to live and to fully experience the joy and good things as well. We may choose to numb, but then we numb all the good too. The sucky thing is that you can’t have one without the other.

And yet…

I’m not saying non-cancers or others wouldn’t feel deeply to lose two immediate members to suicide, but I do sometimes wonder to the extent that others feel because I do so deeply.

Suicides often times leave people aghast and horrified, even when the person who took their own life is not a family member.

And though I am a wordsmith, I too struggle to put into words how it feels to have lost my dad and brother this way. And how I carry it with me and feel it deeply, all the time. Devastated. Alone. Disturbed. Words fail me. (But of course, as an English professor, I have to try.)

People—even my close friends and those who care about me—can’t understand the deep wounds it leaves—ones that will never heal, never even scar over, they remain.

They remain as someone says “oh—kill myself!”

They remain as I see someone shot in the head in a movie, even a homicide.

They remain when asked with questions about their deaths.

They remain when people make assumptions that those who “kill themselves are weak.”

They remain when certain religions make the bold assumptions that two of my family members are currently burning in hell for all eternity.

Questions such as these, they are unavoidable. They are unpredictable. They hurt. And they will last for the rest of my life.

And when they arise, when they are posed, it punctures the tender pink flesh of the wound that does not heal.

And it bleeds.

I lost my entire nuclear family in five years. It has been 8-5 years, father and brother, respectively. (My mother thrown in there too.)

Maybe it won’t always bleed.

But I think it will, especially as we continue to exist in a world that stigmatizes mental health and make insensitive comments towards or about those with depression so deep that they choose to exit.

We don’t understand it, I get it. I am glad we don’t. I don’t want everyone to have an experience like mine. It’s also good that we don’t have people offing themselves left and right.

Grieving grandparents and parents as well as the untimely death of a sibling is always challenging, indeed. It is never easy to lose a loved one. People are changed in that situation as well.

And still—

With suicides, when they happen, there is shock. There will be trauma but in that moment, you freeze. You feel sick—nauseous, dizzy, light-headed, cold, weak. Time stops. And, quite honestly, a part of you stays in that time and space. Eight years ago, three years ago, I lost little bits of myself that rattled my sense of stability and I still feel them deep into my soul, my bones, my spirit, my essence.

So, when I experience other losses, I feel them deeply, perhaps more deeply because of my C-PTSD. I sometimes erupt in my emotions because of residual grief. Maybe it’s my mental illness. Maybe I’m human and it’s just who I am and how I am made.

I both know and believe that feeling these deep emotions is a vital part of life. It’s written in all the great books and shown in the most magnificent paintings and other works of [he]art. Opera singers sing soulful songs about the deep pain people feel. The best actors bawl and weep to show the pain of humanity in somber stories.

It is written in the stories in the Bible, with Jesus weeping his feelings of desolation and separation from God.

To be human is to feel. It’s what distinguishes us from animals and when people lack these skills, we refer to them as psychopaths or sociopaths, often serial killers and those who do great harm to others.

I don’t know how not to feel. Sometimes I wish I did, that I could. And that is why I have taken solace and escape in bottles of wine over the years. Because that pain is always there. It is still there when I drink but it felt less, and other than sleep, it was the only time where it wasn’t there in full form. But such measures are certainly not healthy or sustainable. I have to feel all of it. Sometimes though it feels that my heart splits open.

But I have learned that splitting my heart open again and again is simply what I have to do, even if my story is a rare and grave one, it is the only one that I have. The life I’ve been given unless I were to choose to exit as well, which I made a vow not to do. And again, truly, the only way to really live is to feel.

I take a lot of stock in emotions.

But I do wonder about my feels with the deaths of my family members—

With other types of grief, deaths of other family members, we like to say that it never goes away, but you learn to live with it and though it doesn’t shrink, simply more space grows around it.

I like that metaphor. I think it’s true. And yet, I think—

Will it be the same with suicide deaths?

We will never get over it, of course. But deeper, and beyond that—

In a world of stigmatized mental illness and judgment of death by depression, will we ever hold space for suicide family survivors, with “feeling” a bit more compassion and empathy than we currently do—with our language? Attitudes? Religious beliefs? Probing questions about their deaths that result in horrific responses and reactions?

It is hard to see that happening. We have such a long way to go. I know we’re better than we used to be; we are still not good enough.

And until then, I will continue to be probed, poked in my wounds and I will bleed.

And only those in solidarity of losing someone they loved to suicide, will have any true understanding of how it felt, feels, and continues to feel.

We don’t want to talk about it; it scares people.

Until it happens to you.

Then you can’t not think about it and you too will have to bleed open.

So, again, I remind you— these, the suicides, not as rare as we like to believe.