One of the worst feelings in the world is thinking that your thoughts, opinions, and emotions are not valid, be it because of your age, gender, or sexuality. People will never really let you voice your opinions all the time, and they can tell you to shut your mouth as much as they want, but they cannot stop you from having thoughts.
Everyone has thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and no person truly understands what is going on within you, and you have every right to feel whatever you're feeling.
Anyone's feelings are authentic and valid, whether or not the perceptions, thoughts and beliefs one has of the situation are true to life and accurate. Being direct feedback from your body, feelings are simply reports on what is occurring both within yourself and the environment. Whatever you feel is, most obviously, undoubtedly what you feel. We do not know what another living thing feels. A Zen koan portrays this clearly:
One day Chuang-tzu and a friend were walking along a riverbank. "How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water!", Chuang-tzu exclaimed.
"You are not a fish," his friend said. "How do you know whether or not the fishes are enjoying themselves?"
"You are not me," Chuang-tzu said. "How do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"
Of course, neither Chuang-tzu nor his friend actually did know whether the fish were enjoying themselves or not. It is pure speculation on the part of both of them! Just because what you feel is authentically and validly what you feel, this does not mean the feeling is true to life and accurate, since it can be massively influenced by what you think and what you do. In a way, when you are present and observing your mind with all it's thoughts and beliefs, all of these begin as "suspects", since none of these are true in reality, only conceptualizations. Once seen through, and as if they are recognized as not influencing and distorting feelings, then they are "prospects" and benign in terms of distorting the message inside the feeling as it is felt all the way through your body to decode its message.
First of all, you can know that all feelings are what they are. If anyone aims to tell you that you feel differently than you do, then in this moment you can be certain that this other person doesn't know what they are talking about since it concerns how you feel, not him or her.
This behavior, designed to influence and convince you that what you are feeling is not so and it is supposedly some other feeling and that the other person knows better for you know than you know for yourself how you feel, "crazy-making" since it totally contradicts your direct reality, thus setting you up to think you are "going crazy." While the other person's intention may seem to be friendly and out of love, the reality is that each person is the only one who truly can know what he or she is feeling in any situation and at any time, and not anyone else, without any doubt or exception.
