Feeling afraid of feeling.

Why are we so afraid of winning? Or even living?

Stopping ourselves right as we cross the finish line is becoming harder and harder to justify to ourselves as we age.

The general concept of ‘feeling’ can sometimes itself feel like a failure. It’s not just ‘feeling’ bad after having too many beers or ‘feeling’ like you’re not able to keep up. I talk about the other side of it too, the feeling of winning, the feeling of loving, the feeling of letting go with this cosmic freedom and the comedown of guilt that slowly overfills the pool, water splashing everyone else on the sidelines. Like our success of feeling happy or even starting to work those early stages of working through the guilt and being uncomfortable in your own body will be at the detriment of others.

I’ve recently been thinking of shame as dirt. Dust bunnies that can be collected and cleared over time with meditation, exercise and a good night’s sleep. The smaller grains of sand are the scariest, so embedded you may never be able to remove them. The only possible way it seems is to dig your nails into the flesh, scratching an uncomfortable itch, unsure how much this tender organ can take, fearing the grooved scars from the scrape.

But what if that feeling was pleasurable? Delve deeper into understanding why the sand got in there in the first place and, instead of self-sabotaging with marks, washing it out. Is there a fear we wash more than the sand away? A shame that if we lose, we won’t know how to survive with a version of ourselves that is successful? What if the ‘shame’ that was thrust upon us is actually just an element of being human and we’re missing out?

Gehrin im Querschnitt - Greg Dunn

The moment you stand up and say ‘no’ to all the shame thrust upon you, whether you’re coming forward to get yourself out of a self-limiting, ‘that’s so cringe’ mindset, becoming embarrassed that things or people have gotten to you, or there’s no evidence of the shame invading your brain at all, you’re still the one to pick yourself out of the dust, ring it out of your ears and be left to clean it up yourself, and even pay the cleaners to get it out of there.

But then we’re locked into a cynical cycle of proving to your brain, one of the most important organs, if not the smartest organ in a social setting, that you can indeed move on from this shame (or at least become accustomed to it) through real-world experience.

The reason I write this is complicated within my own life, but I feel like we’re all out here doing our best and some of us are afraid to ask for more. Whether it’s more out of a skill, relationship or friendship or even the option of less? Maybe we need to break a contract early because the current one is causing more harm than good to our lifestyle. How far are we willing to protect ourselves from getting ‘messy’ in order to actually overcome to achieve the thing it is that we really want? And are we limiting our brains or even protecting our ego by telling ourselves that the ‘desire of wanting’ something is much more attractive than the thing itself? It’s safe to want that outcome, telling yourself it’s ‘manifesting’, but replaying hypotheticals over and over and over again rather than acting on it because in reality it might not work out, which in result has us with that gross feeling of failure.

What happens when we receive the thing, goal, dream or person we desire, but the guilt or shame of receiving something becomes overwhelming and strips that ‘high’ away? One of my personal fears is having someone romantically like me back and thinking, “Oh no, I’ve conned them into liking me, they’re going to be so disappointed they wasted their time.”

It’s easier to dream than it is to receive.

Recently I’ve gone on a venture of ‘why do we believe in what we believe in’. And yes, I’m absolutely influenced by the nurture and upbringing of what surrounds us, family, community, mass media, art and the rest, but I’ve been thinking about shame on a societal level as well as an individual one. This topic of shame varies. It could be something easily recognised as shame, like failure, social exclusion or being labelled ‘bad’, like a ‘bad mum’ or it could be something as misunderstood as wanting more or trying something new without being seen as a different person, or as being too much. Even the current shame in saying out loud, “I don’t know, I can’t answer that for you,” when everyone around you has a question or an opinion on why you’re doing what you’re doing.

We have a lot going on in our brains. It holds an estimated 100 billion neurons in which we can experience so many wonderful and horrific things, fear, arousal, excitement, anger, joy, all holding similar bodily sensations, and yet these neurons work in unison to tell you which emotion you’re assigned to.

This feedback loop scares me in the sense we have both everything and nothing over it when it comes to control.

But god, do I feel, physically and all over all the time. That laugh that vibrates through my body from the ache from dancing too hard the night before.

I don’t want to want the feeling, I want to know that I lived it.

I don’t want the artificial feeling of wanting to see an act live by playing the song over and over again on streaming, telling myself it would be too hard to snag tickets. I want to be chanting it with my friends at a festival, the wind, rain, dirt and cold worth it because I’m there experiencing it. I don’t want to look at pictures of food in restaurants online. I want to go and experience it myself, tasting how that bottle of red tastes in that very moment, with those very people, in this very weather, because no one will ever experience this very feeling the way I do even if I get a headache from the preservatives the next day.

Feelings are terrifying and scary and overwhelming, especially when you feel them so deep and physically and they sit in those neurons ready to tell the rest of your body it’s go-time. I think recently the hardest thing is finding the energy to commit to experiencing more, to learn more about the soil that’s planting seeds rather than the dirt clogging up the drains. I always encourage you to go alone, but if you need a friend to talk to, someone somewhere is happy to plant with you.