Feeling like Shit to Feel Better
By Theo Tran
Moving on isn’t a thing.
Which is essentially what my therapist was telling me — and I more or less told him that human nature is horrendous. In the ideal world, moving on is perfectly real. Moving on from traumatic experiences, failed relationships, so on and so forth. But those types of experiences are virtually never experiences that you can move past wholly, no matter how much time has passed. At least, nothing would pass without me feeling like shit about it first.
It was the fact that we, as people, naturally hold onto feelings from previous relationships — whether they ended well or not. Relationship norms have historically pushed against “having feelings for your ex.” The expectation of encountering an ex, or just a former crush, is defined by being over them.
That’s the acceptable reaction, that is — you’re expected to be nonchalant. To have your feelings stirred up is interpreted to be a lack of faithfulness in your new relationships — as if to say that because you still have ambiguous feelings about people from your past, you’re not allowed to form new relationships until you erase that part of yourself. It’s a rigid structure, what we expect from relationships.
This isn’t, though, to say that it’s 100% fine to get into a new relationship immediately after you end one, when your feelings are still unavoidable. It’s merely to say that the norms we impose on our own feelings are unrealistic. Emotions are so intensely human — our humanity is defined by emotion, and they can’t be separated. Objectivity can only go so far. The struggle for me, for some time, was bottling up the fact that I did still have feelings for a friend of mine.
It was a disaster-class of denial — I don’t have feelings, there’s no reason I should still have feelings, I’m moved on, there’s no chance, I don’t have feelings. It’s the “shouldn’t” that I imposed on myself — something that’s all too common for many. You shouldn’t be upset, shouldn’t be so selfish, shouldn’t be so hurt by this, that, or the other. But the thing is you do feel it — your head tells you to pull it together, and your heart is going to be hurt, going to be angry, going to be selfish regardless.
I’m usually the kind of person to say that I manage my emotions well, that I don’t often bottle things up. But when I feel like a bad person purely for experiencing human emotion, it tears me down.
I had a moment with my brother a few days back, too, where it felt as though I meant to keep something to myself — something that didn’t seem like a significant enough issue. I like to say that I have a bad tendency to rationalize my own feelings into the ground. No matter how valid a feeling is, I don’t necessarily bottle up as much as I do convince myself that it was never an issue to begin with.
So when my brother more-or-less fell off the face of the earth, rarely actually held a conversation, and fell through on plans constantly, I told myself that it was nothing to be sad about. They were busy, and I was busy too — why be sad? People get busy. I understood that. But I was frustrated — and subsequently made a feedback loop for myself. On the occasion that he was able to follow through with plans, I was too frustrated in my own right to make the plans happen. I started not being able to hold conversations myself, either, because I felt
too stuck in my own head for it. Evidently, rationalizing my own feelings into the ground was not a successful endeavor by any means.
The issue, in this case, was that I didn’t want to feel upset. I didn’t want to feel as though I was being selfish or high and mighty. But I did feel upset, and I did feel selfish — because I missed my brother. I missed them, and I never told them, not until months into this feedback loop of a widening distance between us.
So the advice I got then, from my professionally trained, medically accredited therapist, was, to feel like shit.
This was another “shouldn’t” moment — convincing myself that my feelings were bullshit. The fact of the matter, though, was that my feelings were all too real then. “Shouldn’t” would not work because I did feel that way. I did feel like shit. It’s objectively a simple concept — accept your negative feelings before you can actually “get over” them.
So I felt like shit over the fact that it didn’t feel asthough my brother cared as much as I did about spending time together. And I told him I felt like shit, and now we both feel better.
And I felt like shit over the fact that I still had feelings for one particular guy — and felt like shit over the fact that I had these feelings even when he was in a new relationship with someone else, and I felt like shit because I wanted to have a relationship of my own, and I felt like shit because it felt like the romanticized teenagehood of every form of media had passed me by.
And most importantly, I felt like shit because I didn’t think I should have these feelings at all. So I’m still figuring that out. How to feel like shit so that I can feel better.
About the Author
Theo Tran is a high school senior from Denver, Colorado. He is a first-generation Vietnamese American, and identifies as both transgender and gay. Theo is deeply passionate about history and the social sciences, which has fueled his participation in grassroots organizing at the local level. Theo joined Matthew’s Place after designing stage lights for his school’s production of The Laramie Project, where like so many, he resonated profoundly with Matthew’s story and the foundation’s mission: to erase hate. He plans to become a teacher in the future, and has experience in political organizing. You can reach out to Theo at tkpr.tran@gmail.com for any questions, comments, or just to have a chat!