On Coexisting Emotions: Moving Forward With Both Happiness and Pain

It never really occurred to me that I often experience two or more conflicting emotions at once, especially right now in the uncertain and uneasy times that we are living in. The shutdown of our society has given me even more of reason to step back and observe myself and my behaviors – just some actions I’m taking to aid in my journey of self-awareness and self-compassion.

I’ve been working on giving myself the time and space to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling and move through it with compassion and ease rather than stuffing my feelings deep down into the depths of my soul only to fester and eventually eat me alive.

With this higher sense of awareness, I realize that lately I’ve been experiencing contradictory emotions at once - happiness and sadness, love and anger, loss and liberation, fear and bravery. Sometimes I honestly can’t decide on whether to shut down emotionally or turn into the hulk and punch a hole through the wall.

But we, as human beings, are emotional creatures and are meant to experience all kinds of feelings in our lifetime- it’s how we handle our emotions that shapes who we are.

With the extra time on my hands, I finally had a chance to get all caught up on one of my favorite shows, This Is Us.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler. I just want to take a moment to recognize what was said in one of the last monologues of the season 4 finale.

Two of the main characters in the show seek out some advice from the doctor who delivered their triplets – one of whom did not make it during the birth.

The doctor, a wise and elderly man with plenty of experience under hist belt, looks at these two characters who are trying to move forward and tells them of a song he used to sing to his unborn child, Blue Skies written by Irving Berlin. He explains that he sang that song to his unborn baby years and years ago until his baby died during the birth:

I sang that song every day to my unborn child… and then we lost that child. For the first month after that my wife and I would sit in our den and listen to that song on our scratchy old record player over and over again. It made us so sad. Like we were punishing ourselves. But then one day, my wife got pregnant again and to my great surprise I found myself singing that very same song to that very same belly. And then 25 years later, I danced with my daughter to that song at her wedding. That song made us happy, mad us sad, made us happy again- a whole human experience just wrapped up in that one song.

Hospital’s kinda like that ya know. These bizarre buildings where people experience some of their greatest joys and some of the most awful tragedies all under one roof.

I think the trick is not trying to keep the joys and the tragedies apart. But you kinda gotta let ‘em cozy up to one another, ya know? Let em coexist.

And I think that if you can do that – if you can manage to forge ahead with all that joy and heartache mixed up inside of ya, never knowing which one is gonna get the upper hand-

Then well, life does have a way of shaken out to be more beautiful than tragic.

Over the course of quarantine, I was blessed with several opportunities to advance in my career with a new job and an internship for which I am incredibly grateful for. (I mean, I’ve been looking for a job since going back to school and once the world shuts down, I finally land one? Interesting.) But I’ve also experienced some agonizing heartache.

One day, I found that I was unable to stop the tears from falling. I had an intense emotional knot in the pit of my stomach that I eventually surrendered to until it finally passed.

What I couldn’t understand, though, was why I let the heartache get to me when I had these other wonderful possibilities and opportunities opening up for me. I was actually getting angry with myself for not being able to overlook the sadness I was feeling to solely focus on my accomplishments.

Coincidentally, that night I watched the season finale of This Is Us and listened closely to what the doctor had to say. Sometimes, I think the Universe gives us exactly what we need when we need it.