My Feelings Are Mine
My emotions are real, and they are private. They belong to me, not to whatever happens in the room.
You have been living as though your feelings had to be calibrated, always, for someone else's comfort. Your feelings are not currency. They are not data to be collected. They are not material to be performed or hidden or proven. They are the inner weather of a living person, and they belong to you alone.
For a long time, you may have learned to make your feelings visible enough to be acceptable and hidden enough not to provoke. Calibrated — quietly, constantly — to the room. That is exhausting work. It is also the slow erasure of the most intimate part of you. You can stop calibrating now. Your inner weather is no one else's instrument to read.
This does not mean you do not feel anything. It means your feelings have a true home again. You can rage, in your own kitchen, into a pillow no one hears. You can cry, in the safety of a trusted helper's office, without performing the right amount of composure afterward. You can be quietly devastated on a Tuesday and tell no one but the friend who has earned the truth. You can be giddy with relief that nobody else understands. All of it is yours.
If you carry your feelings out into rooms where they have been used against you, you are not obliged to display them there. Showing nothing on your face is not dishonesty. It is the protective layer your inner life is allowed to have. The people who have earned your interior get to see it. The people who have not, simply do not.
What used to be performance is now quieting, which is becoming the deep return — the grief you feel only with yourself becomes the truest grief, the joy you keep gently to yourself becomes the truest joy, the anger that lives in your own body, witnessed by you, becomes the truest anger.
Come home to your own feelings. They have missed you.