Let’s Talk About Feelings (I Hate Them)

Let’s talk about feelings. I hate them.

They’re loud, inconvenient, and have terrible timing.

Feelings don’t ask permission.
They show up and redecorate your nervous system. The highs, the lows, the good, the bad. Love. Pain. Joy. Heartbreak.

Highs are their own kind of distraction.
Falling in love. Landing the job offer. Getting away with something you shouldn’t have. Praise. Approval. Validation. My favorite place to live.

Others we buy - alcohol, drugs, caffeine, sugar.
Same rush. Different dealer.

Dopamine has terrible judgment. It sponsors most of my worst decisions.

Love, because it has a way of making red flags look green.
Alcohol, because limits have never been my forte - one sip of indulgence slides straight into regret. Evading consequences didn’t make me safer. It just improved my technique.

Pain does the same thing, though it’s far less enjoyable. When serotonin is low, I’m low, and my brain sprints for the nearest emergency exit. Anything that promises relief. Which usually ends with consequences, an apology tour, and lingering shame reminding me “I should’ve known better.”

My tolerance for discomfort used to be microscopic, with coping skills built entirely on instant gratification. I’d escape one feeling only to create twelve new ones.

After structuring my entire life around avoiding discomfort, now comes the latest trending advice:

“Sit with the uncomfortable.”
So you’re telling me to torture myself on purpose?

Meditate. Practice mindfulness.
Meditation… just me and my brain’s greatest hits. No thanks.

Then there’s the advice I hate most because it’s annoyingly true:

“Time heals.” Okay. But when? One month? Three? A year? I like timelines. Instead, I’m told to trust the process and live in the present.

Which is how I ended up seeing psychics. At least they can read the cards life dealt me and tell me what’s next.

When that didn’t work, I went back to my therapist.
She’d listen to my 40-minute tangents, which always ended the same way: “But I’m fine.”
She’d smile and say, “It doesn’t sound like you’re fine.”
Then we’d dive into the maze of secondary emotions, body scans, the whole drill until we landed on the primaries.
Shame. Fear. Rejection. Being too much.

GREAT. Now I’m self-aware and uncomfortable.

Awareness isn’t some peaceful epiphany.
It’s the moment you realize the things that once saved you are now the things destroying you.
It involves tears, discomfort, and with that much insight… maybe Prozac.

Eventually it stopped being about controlling feelings and more about building the capacity to tolerate them.
Patience instead of trying to control every outcome.

Which feels like assembling furniture that arrives in 900 pieces with instructions in Mandarin.
So foreign you want to quit at step 1½.

Healing isn’t about getting it right every time. Sometimes it’s falling back into old habits and having the awareness to catch it sooner.

If your nervous system never learned it’s safe to fall and rise again, the unknown doesn’t feel like possibility. It feels like a threat.

Maybe I don’t hate feelings.
I hate how quickly they hijack everything and how out of control they make me feel. And when all else fails…there’s always Lexapro.

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