I recently read a quote from a contemporary poet (and very interesting guy if you’re into all things Irish) named Pádraig Ó Tuama that really spoke to me:
In Irish when you talk about emotion, you don’t say, “I am sad.” You’d say, “Sadness is on me” — “ta bron orm.” And I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while. Something else will be on me at another time, and that’s a good thing to recognize. So it’s good to know it, but also good not to use a kind of a language that says that this is the everything.
This concept gives weight to the idea that emotions are fleeting. They may be strong or weak, they may feel hard to pin down at times, but they are always changing. When you wake up in the morning you may feel groggy or hungry or overwhelmed by what the day has in store. But do you continue to feel that exact same way throughout the day? No, not generally. Maybe you hear something funny at work or you see someone you haven’t seen in a long time at the store on the way home. These experiences cause us to feel certain emotions which are obviously temporary. And yet when it comes to the emotions that are harder to navigate (anger, shame, sadness, embarrassment, overwhelm, etc) it often feels as if these emotions or feelings hang on a lot longer and so we want to push them away. Nobody wants to “be angry” and so it’s quite easy to instead say “I’m not angry, I’m fine” as if for some reason being angry is bad or negative. If we reframe the way we look at emotions to being something that is “on us” for a time, it might make it feel more acceptable for us to stay with the challenging feelings long enough to learn how to navigate them without succumbing to the desire to push them away without exploring what is behind them. It feels almost easier to navigate anger or overwhelm when the anger is “on us” rather than defining us.
Take a few moments to think of a time when you had a challenging emotion “on you” and how it felt. How did you navigate through it? How long did it last and was it noticeable after it had passed on by? Think about the concept of feelings being on you instead of feelings defining you and how that changes (or doesn’t change) the way in which you view yourself.
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MIndfully,
Meredith