why your feelings are valid

emotions are physical.

loneliness can extend itself into physical illness, heartbreak can cause nausea and intense aching, love can be understood by its chemicals and so on and so on.

it’s rare that our emotions are confined purely to the psyche; they inevitably extend into our daily habits and health and thus should be seen as exactly what they are…

valid

wholeheartedly, genuinely and simply valid. the extent to which we feel should be acknowledged by the people who are around us - however, it doesn’t mean you can act entirely upon your own accord. “hurt people hurt people” is not a justification for someone being a shitty person. they made a choice. they decided to be shitty.

I digress…

in a 2014 study by Glerean, Hari and Hietanen regarding the ‘bodily maps of emotions’ they found that happiness and love were spread all throughout the body whereas depression spread everywhere except the middle regions of the body.

as a poet with a mind that likes to wander into art, I couldn’t help but pity depression and its solitude from the heart. happiness and love were able to leap around the body; butterflies in the stomach, the racing of the heart and the completeness of an emotion making you whole. depression however seemed stuck; isolated from the warmth of a beating, loving heart and having to ache throughout the rest of the body in an attempt to make up for what it had lost.

this led me to wonder whether emotions can be trapped and thus if they can be released. was it as simple as inhale, impale, exhale? (I’m hilarious).

there have been quite a few studies into trauma being trapped in your body. Boston-area researchers suggested that stem cells can actually store your tissue’s past memories (when we go through something traumatic, the energy of that trauma is stored in our tissues until it can be released, meaning that our stem cell’s remember this energy too).

another example of this is within a poem I wrote called Epigenetics

my mother’s sadness

curled up into her genes

sleeping dormant with grief

until it found the relief

of expressing itself in me

I wrote this after I found out what epigenetics were (they’re genes that are altered due to your environment and behaviours). research into epigenetics and their influence on the inheritance of mental health is fairly new but I wondered whether it was truly a coincidence that my mother, sister and I share similar mental health experiences. it is worth noting that my sister and I only share our mother’s DNA and thus was our mother’s trauma the reason why we had a genetic vulnerability for it too?

I’m no scientist but I am an ordinary person who has grown up unaware of the power of her body, unaware of the power of my genes, unaware of why my genes may be the way they are, unaware of how my body stores my experiences and unaware about why I feel so physically.

I am also a sentimental individual - I feel in abundance. when I love, I love so that every fibre of my being is alive. when I cry, I cry for everything I have ever lost. and though I can sometimes filter out this intensity, I am overall an individual who feels quite physically.

when my ex broke up with me last year (after 6 years together) I truly understood what it meant to sob. I cried so loudly that half my street could hear the physicality of my pain; I couldn’t digest food without feeling every bit of my loss boil into nausea; I couldn’t stop the aching in my chest that felt like my heart was pounding its fist against my ribs, begging me to get him back; I just couldn’t stop feeling. and honestly I didn’t want to stop. all the losses that proceeded him were often solved by pushing them into the abyss of denial - I decided this time round that was not going to be the way I dealt with the intensity of my emotions.

and like every woman going through a break up I made two playlists - one was titled ‘and sob’, the other ‘and breathe’ (most of my creativity was spent writing break up poetry, okay?)

now when I listen back to ‘After the Rain’ from Standing at the Sky’s Edge or Maisie Peters’ ‘Lost the Breakup’ I can physically feel a slight drop of that heartbreak, as if the melody was magnetic and my pain was attracted to it. it’s as if the music pulled that moment back into consciousness. could this be stem cell memory? could this be linked to the way I feel because of epigenetics? or is most likely an involuntary memory caused by emotional memory cue? I believe the latter is correct but somehow my heart is yearning for me to understand that everything is linked - that my mind causes my body to feel, and my body causes my mind to think. together they allow me to realise that no matter the way science defines it…

my emotions have always been valid.