Permission to feel big emotions

Received unexpected encouragement, reading it makes me cry...thinking about it makes me cry.

This has come up before, but I was thinking about all the censors to our emotions, how people tell you when you're sad or worse, that you are "having first-world problems" or someone has it worse than you.  Completely dismissing you, as if because you live here, you have no right to have any emotions, you must go through life as a robot.  You can't be happy or joyful, because you're "rubbing it into" someone who is not.  You can't celebrate yourself or your successes, unless you overcame some horrible situation, then we give each other permission to be happy or ecstatic.  If you cry over an injustice, you're being a victim.  If you're angry, you've gone off the deep end.  (Lucky are the people who have someone in their life who lets them feel their emotions fully.)  And so, we stop ourselves before someone else does, in fear of what someone else will say or think about us.

This morning, I was trying to find a situation that I could be ecstatic over and I kept finding myself damping it down...out of reflex.  And I'm supposed to do it here, no one's judging me for going there.  It's acceptable.  Children do it instinctively until we socialize them out of it, and then once they become adults, they spend the rest of theirs lives trying to get back in touch with it.  A lifetime of "NO's" standing in the way on one "YES!"

What they give

I've mentioned this somewhere or to someone I think. The most important thing I learned in the physical theatre (and singing) classes I've taken is the permission to go big and fail. I can't always do it, maybe I can hardly do it at all, but there is a shift in perception in me. I didn't realize I had been holding my breath waiting for permission to be able to fail. Somehow I had learned I had to be perfect, and so I held back (oh, hell, from EVERYTHING) because I wasn't "perfect" and wasn't "good enough." Does that make sense? It's hard to explain. I had kinda' forgotten about it until just now when I was writing an assignment for my clown instructor. I know it's possible in other classes, but it was never explicit, and here, in these classes, it is, and it's expected. It's life-changing, you know. It's one thing to hear it, and quite another to believe it, to begin to be able to live it.

Just got a notice from the library that Art and Fear is now available, talk about good timing.

(And now that the swelling has gone down, I can see all the individual bite marks, there are 6 or 7, all from the same individual, all in the crook of my elbow. That yellow jacket got me pretty good.)