All The Big Feels
When we reveal ourselves to our partner and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery — that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are…
This kind of unmasking — speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges — is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch more deeply.
- John Welwood
The year is 2017 and it’s the middle of October. I’m writing a blog description titled, “15 Songs to Help You Deal with a Breakup,” because what else does a 20-something grown boy with adolescent emotional coping skills and understanding of love expected to do post the end of a two-year relationship? And if your response is, “go to therapy,” I need you to calm down -- that would have made too much sense at the time.
Yet, my longing “to know love” remained clouded by an obsessive fear to surrender to trusting myself and a significant other.
Heart-stopping revelations
Instead, the Boy would need a few more years stumbling looking for love from the affection of his emotionally unavailable sexual partners. At the time, I was both swept up by a new sense of freedom [to fuck whoever and whenever without guilt]. Yet this feeling was also mixed with an intense, despairing sadness caused by the breakup and my pattern of practicing love [or the lack of it] with a growing list of emotionally wounded men.
As autumn continued its descent towards winter’s death hold, for that season and the years that would follow, the Boy had to learn to not let big feelings of despair win.
With time I would come to understand this big scary emotion, as bell hooks describes in All About Love, “it was despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could nor be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime.” Maybe overly sentimental. A bit silly. And perhaps superficial. But to recount of the ways the Boy yearned to know this true love — to receive and to give it, at the time the right words or understanding of it failed to surface.
So, in the absence of those verbs and nouns, the music, a surface-level Spotify playlist, provided me the syntax for expressing all my big feels of the moment. While my list of midnight lovers gave me feelings of affectionate care to cope as the days got shorter and the nights longer, colder. Yet, my longing “to know love” remained clouded by an obsessive fear to surrender to trusting myself and a significant other.
Palmer shares, “I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness, and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.”
As autumn continued its descent towards winter’s death hold, for that season and the years that would follow, the Boy had to learn to not let big feelings of despair win. Little did he know at the time, the Boy was being challenged to know how to tap into an indestructible light from deep within. Behind his desire and hope for an endless internal summer, was his longing rooted in the belief, as hooks writes, “I was not ready to die because I had not yet found the love my heart had been seeking.”
Profound moral questioning
With wisdom, compassion, and gentle humor, life would find a way to force me, as Parker J. Palmer in Let Your Life Speak invites us to do, “listen to the inner teacher and follow its leading towards a sense of meaning and purpose.” Palmer recounts stories from his own life and those of others who made a difference. Illuminating firsthand insights gained from his personal descent into darkness and isolation as well as feelings of fulfillment and joy, Palmer writes, “on the inward and downward spiritual journey the only way out is in and through.”
Reflecting on what happened to him once passing through the dark valley of depression, Palmer shares, “I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness, and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.” His conclusion for why he managed to navigate this period of his life while others might not, required him to accept the fact, in his words, “choices that lead to wholeness are not pragmatic and calculated, intended to achieve some goal” instead are “simply and profoundly expressive of personal truth.”
In her book Love, Toni Morrison depicts a culture which confuses love and the act of loving to be all things shrewd, passion, funny, erotic, power, and heart-wrenching.
Searing depiction of a doomed love and toxic acts of loving
So for the Boy, before he could truly be well from deep in his soul, to echo bell hooks, he first had to journey “honestly and realistically confronting lovelessness as part of his healing process.” Because to do so, required the Boy to reconcile the fact that his long-term romantic relationships, like the bonds in his family, and now with his inner child, though have been full of care should not overlook the ongoing emotional dysfunction.
In her book Love, Toni Morrison depicts a culture which confuses love and the act of loving to be all things shrewd, passion, funny, erotic, power, and heart-wrenching. Morrison’s protagonists – wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress – stake claim on the memory and estate of Bill Cosey, the man who enjoyed their affections, and who they would do almost anything to gain his favor. In his passing the women use everything from intrigue to outright violence in their fury to immortalize their own “relationship of affection and care” all in the name of love for self and most importantly, Cosey. Toni Morrison’s depiction sadly illustrates this not knowing of genuine love. In turn making it feel like a terrible secret for the three generations of black women, as they confuse the act of loving with their own spellbinding tales of actually lacking love.
On our unique journey to love throughout all seasons of our lives, we might and will likely still find ourselves stumbling toward our desired destination. But to overcome all the big feels, is to know with clear eyes and a full heart, echoing Bell Hooks, “what we mean when we speak of love.”
The truth is, many of us, and those who parented us and those entrusted with the responsibility of modeling “love” for us, unfortunately despite however well-meaning, caring, or affectionate, were sold toxic acts of lovelessness. Making it no surprise, for why, as bell hooks notes, “learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older.” Because to experience genuine love – a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect – is to nurture one’s own “wounded spirit” and to enable a people and a nation to “survive acts of lovelessness.”
In 2017, the Boy had to experience a bit more life before he could articulate and make sense of all the big feels and scary emotions of dysfunction. Five years later, the Boy on his journey to malehood, finds himself as a 30-something single still intent to love. For now, the act of defining lovelessness has been a vital breakthrough and starting point for the Boy and me — for us, to imagine what we desire to come into being.
On our unique journey to love throughout all seasons of our lives, we might and will likely still find ourselves stumbling toward our desired destination. But to overcome all the big feels, is to know with clear eyes and a full heart, echoing bell hooks, “what we mean when we speak of love.”
Listen to my full Spotify and Youtube playlist “All The Big Feels” below!
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Listen to my full Spotify and Youtube playlist “All The Big Feels” below! 〰️
Have a song I should hear? Email me with your suggestion!
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