An intuitive sense of feeling
Tuesday, 12/05/26
It's been one hell of an intense weekend.
I got so warm and it was so cool, but now I'm not feeling too hot and i have burned my finger tips trying to reach for something that, for now, remains beyond my reach.
A lot of things still elude me.
But a lot of things are shifting into something for my soul and mind to make sense of, slowly, organically.
Every month for the past 5 or so, I've been experiencing new things and old things freshly and with a renewed sense of emotional tangibility. The veil within me, the one that made it so hard for me to point to emotions and label them, the one that made me wonder, whether I'm just feeling very intensely and overwhelmingly or whether I'm actually feeling nothing, that veil is being pierced continuously.
I *am* feeling and i *can* confidently label it, at least I'm beginning to.
And while that is incredibly beautiful, something i had deemed categorically impossible to regain ever again just half a year ago, it also carries with it the daunting weight of challenges, questions to be answered, decisions to be made.
I haven't been able to properly and appropriately "feel through" things for years. I have "thought through" all of it, but that can only ever be part of the process.
Thinking through, evaluating, analysing.
These words evoke a sense of rationale and reflection. Of a cool-headed, unbiased, neutral and objective process taking place. But is that what it's ever been for me? Hardly so, especially in those past couple of years. Instead this process has been working relentlessly and elegantly to make sense of what i experience, seemingly unbiased. But this process has been dealing with a context so unbalanced and misplaced, that in it's own self-aware confidence it didn't ever consider that it *itself* could be the issue.
I've been experiencing self-hatred, self-doubt, isolation, distance, numbness, anxiety, fear, despair, shame, sadness, longing, yearning, exhaustion, expectation, disappointment, rumination, obsession, emptiness... and what the "thinking through" did, it took all of that and said:
"Ok, I'll work this into a narrative that seems logical, congruent, coherent - true."
And so it did, resulting in me telling myself, that all these feelings follow from specific things that, eventually, i can trace back to their roots until I'm left with two statements, one of them or both being true as a rule of nature:
1. It's my own fault, I deserve it. I have led my life in such ways to lead me here, these emotions emerge as a direct consequence of that and now that I can't bear it any longer, i realise that i myself have obscured my own path too much and for too long to find a footing ever again.
2. It's irredeemable, unchangeable, set in stone. These emotions all follow from logical connections, from me walking the path that would lead to the here and now. And while i can now decide to take a different path, i cannot go back to where the path diverged from "happiness". I can't go back and retrace, i can only decide to take different paths from now on, but i am already too far in, I've already doomed myself to keep heading in the same direction.
I was stuck with a narrative - a way of thinking, feeling, sensing, making sense of it all, of *experiencing* - that left me with two options:
Try to change it, which it wouldn't allow, since that would have meant "lying to myself".
Or to change things in such a way that the narrative would rewrite itself, which the *constant* sense of analysing and meta-awareness for me being right now wouldn't allow. I was stuck with a narrative in which i experienced *everything* as the big, immeasurably deep hole, lacking, missing. *Everything* as in *every single thing* as well as in *the one big whole, my life, my existence* and i couldn't help it. Every attempt at disproving the narrative could be and was consistently rewritten to tear me apart.
For example the phrase *"But you are NOT alone"*. What would my mind, my narrative make of it?
*"I'm not alone, indeed. But what then is this feeling? Why then does it still feel as though nothing and nobody was experiencing my world with me? If I'm not alone, then this must be how life feels regardless. It means that this sense of love, connection, warmth, trust and togetherness, that lies at the core of my yearning for a life worth being lived can't follow from whatever i try to evoke it, not from anything at all. And what then is there even left to do?"*
I couldn't win. I could argue and still not feel what I so desperately wanted to feel or i could act and still not feel what i so desperately wanted to feel.
I could *think* and i could *do*, but nothing helped me *feel*. And that has started changing now.
This weekend i could *feel* having missed, being delighted to reconnect, loving, appreciating, being proud, being cared for and about. I was able to focus on a person i love and *feel*, almost sense tactilely, this rush of warmth and comfort. Something that before would have been interpreted as anxiety maybe or that would have been made unenjoyable by my thoughts intervening before the feeling itself could ever cross the threshold of conscious experience. But now i was just left with that feeling and the conclusion, that this feels very good, that this must be caring, loving, appreciating, not because *"i suppose that's what it must be"*, but because i... feel it.
It's hard to find words that fit, since i know how it feels like *not* to have this intuitive sense of feeling something or anything. And now that it's returning, I'm left with a vocab that was coined by years of (at least telling myself that I'm) not *feeling*. Years of convincing myself that words, my words anyways, can't get to the gist, the essence of what *feeling* is and means to me. Now I'm convinced that it *can*, that there is a place beyond words that is not therefore categorically closed of from a shared sense of connection to it, over it. But there is no logic, no causal chain, that let's me explain what has actually changed, why it now is that way and what it feels like now compared to just half a year ago.
I could of course try to construct one, but in the end there is only one thing i can say has changed for certain: How i feel.
And what does *feeling* mean? Well... *to feel*, i guess.
And so those words have to suffice in describing the most fundamental and important change that i have ever gone through, that i am still going through.
I'm beginning to now *feel through* things again. And i am certain that i have to revisit and face a lot of things again, that i couldn't properly *feel through* at the time, to *feel through* them now.
Those things hurt, but it's the hurt that i need to feel now, in the context of actually *feeling* and being myself, in order for me to make peace with them, to find a sense of consolation and closure. And, yes, it is very hard to do all that, when it feels like the right time to do so has long since passed, but that's just one of those challenges, that i cannot argue my way out of.
I'm returning to a sense of normalcy, because I'm returning to a life *felt*. I've always identified as a person who feels a lot and very intensely. I'm returning to a sense of *self* that does actually feel like myself. I'm turning around, I'm returning, I dare to turn with the turning tides. I can *feel* that i am and that is how i know.
