Emotional Dam

Emotions are like water. Imagine a creek gently flowing on a bright sunny day. The water moves by gradually, trickling and meandering over rocks and pebbles, making its way smoothly down its path. Now, out of your periphery, you see dark, rumbling clouds migrating in your direction.

Before you know it, winds are thrashing, rains are dumping, and chaos has ensued with the most minimal of warnings. The once calm, quiet brook is now a muddy, flooded mess, with debris of branches and sticks building up as a result from the storm. These pieces, over time, begin stockpiling until they are stuck upon one another creating a block in the flow of the water. As the water collects over time, growing in size and weight until the load imposes too much stress on the little sticks and creates a dangerous monsoon wave of everything that has been trapped.

As is life, storms roll in without warning and without our control. Others’ emotions and behaviors pour down on us like buckets of rain. Their actions along with our own life circumstances create debrief like sticks and branches, that if neglected, can build up over time without us knowing. Our internal state may be fine one day but the chaos of constant change will continue to build up like a dam, halting the movement of a healthy flow.

This is not completely our fault though. Humans have an unconscious biological adaptation that ensures we are not aware of the build up of stimulation. This keeps the brain and body from being overwhelmed by everything happening around us. The ability to drive a car and focus on the road, BUT not each bird or squirrel as they scurry by. The attention to watch a movie, AND drown out the noise of a nearby clock or the air vent heating the room. The presence to eat a meal at a restaurant WITHOUT being distracted by the frantic waiters or conversations at other tables. This evolutionary mechanism deciphers what is worth our attention to ensure the whole system is not overrun by constant stimulus. Despite not being conscious of the other occurrences happening around us, they are still absorbed into the brain and body to some capacity.

There are many ways to address and take care of the emotions that can build up: exercise, meditation, breath work, community. One that stands out as a direct tunnel for water to flow through for me is writing.

When I write, words act as a channel for emotions to pass through the body like electricity traveling out of an outlet. In the same way that our thoughts circling in our head can produce more anxiety and a build up of stress internally, putting those words out on paper opens the opportunity for what is stuck within to come out.

With the emotions circling in my life at the moment, my body has been taking the toll. I’m in a huge transitionary period of leaving one chapter and beginning another. This requires so much mental processing, which I’ve been neglecting to do, perpetuating the emotional build up within my own system. Writing is that avenue for me to process this transition. Despite this pain, despite the challenge, I wouldn’t change a thing. My course of action, my plan, my grief, none of it. I’m thankful for the crashing of the waves, however painful they may be, because it reveals how much meaning, care, and value this transition means to for me.