THE MEMORY OF YOU...US...MY 8TH GRADE YEAR

Pent Up Emotions

“We can only bottle up our emotions for so long. Someday that bottle will crack and what we tried to keep in, will pour out in tears.” As I said before, I am the type of person to bottle my feelings up. By doing this, I numb myself to those emotions which results in putting my life on pause. While I may go through with the motions of the day, I can never truly move on until I live through those feelings. Whether they are positive or negative, I can never truly move on until I experience everything I have bottled up. 

Those feelings and emotions are a part of you. By not experiencing them, you will never learn from them. In the end, they help to shape you into who you truly are as a person. Or who you are meant to be.

If you are like me and are the type of person to bottle up your emotions until they build up and bubble over, then hopefully my experiences and advice will help you in ways I wish I had helped others before now. 

Over time, I’ve come to acknowledge my way of coping. I never took the time to take a step back and look at what I was doing with my life. I never took the time to reflect on the things I had been doing that were affecting me negatively. I had come to the realization that my coping skill wasn’t the best way to deal with things. It’s difficult to find a balance when overwhelmed by events in your life that cause a large impact on you. 

After losing Aydin, I shut down. I didn’t want to go back to school or to see anybody or go anywhere. I just wanted to curl up into a ball and just cry. Then, a month after Aydin passed, my boyfriend (at the time) and I had split up. While this seems like a childish thing to bring up, it had a significant effect on me. I suddenly felt like I did before I met Aydin. Like I had nobody, or that I wasn’t good enough. This made me want to completely shut everyone out. So that’s what I did. I kept everything bottled up and pushed my friends and family away. I had shut myself out from those who mattered the most and put myself in the position where I felt as though I was alone and had nobody to confide in. 

This is a feeling that nobody should ever have to experience. After losing both my best friend and my boyfriend, I thought everything was over. I had thought that there was no point in living. I had lost the one person who made sure I made rational choices, and I had lost the person who I loved and cared about deeply. Some people may think that because I am only fourteen years old, I do not know what it is like to truly love someone. That’s the thing, age is just a number. You don’t have to be a full-grown adult to know what love is. This boy, my boyfriend at the time, is someone who I loved. I loved him and he loved me. I still love and care for him just not in the same way, but in the end, things just hadn’t worked out and we parted ways. 

Once we split up, I pushed everyone away. By doing this, I had my teachers and my family all concerned about me. Teachers had begun noticing a change in me, my parents had seen a change in me. I had felt a change, and never once did I stop to think that maybe this change was not because I was alone, but because I was pushing everybody away from me. I had not stopped to think that I was the cause of what I was going through. 

If you are like me, I hope that you can learn from my mistakes. In a time of extreme hurt, pain, and grief, don’t shut people out. Let them in. Don’t bottle things up. Let the emotions in. Let everything and everyone in. The people that you let in, can help you overcome and deal with the emotions that you let in. 

If you have trouble with letting it all in at once or letting everyone in, then start small. Let one person in at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself with all the emotions, just start small. I’ve also found that music and writing works as a coping mechanism for me. If you don’t have one that works for you, that might be a place to begin. By starting with letting one person in at a time and slowly letting in the emotions, it’s a slow burn but eventually everything will be released. But there will be times when it all hits you and you get overwhelmed. So in cases like this, I asked a few of my friends to help me make a “pump up playlist”. We had decided only songs that made us want to dance would be on this playlist. So whenever any of us were sad or feeling overwhelmed, we would get together, play these songs, and just dance until we were laughing and rolling on the floor. Sometimes this would be during lunch, free time in class, or even on the phone with one another. 

I am so lucky to have all the friends and family in my life that I do. I am so lucky to call those people my friends. To have had my family who loved me and took care of me. As a result, those who I lost because of emotions and grief, my friends, I lost them because I pushed them away. I thought that I was only dragging them down, but in the end, they were the ones to help pick me up.