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Araceli Lemus-Carrera | BlogAuthor
Someone asks how you're doing. You say "fine." And maybe you even believe it. But somewhere underneath that word — that reliable, frictionless word — something else is quietly accumulating.
We've gotten very good at fine. Fine is frictionless. Fine keeps conversations moving. Fine protects us from having to explain something we haven't even fully understood ourselves. But there's a cost to the constant performance of okay-ness, and it tends to show up in strange places: snapping at someone you love, crying at a commercial, sleeping twelve hours and waking up more tired than before.
The truth is that emotions don't disappear when we suppress them. They go somewhere else.
Emotional suppression is not the same as emotional regulation. Regulation means feeling an emotion, processing it, and choosing how to respond. Suppression means cutting it off before it's registered — often automatically, often without awareness. The feeling doesn't dissolve. Research consistently shows it gets stored: in the body, in behavioral patterns, in how we react to things that seem unrelated.
The classic example is the person who "never gets angry" — until they do, explosively, over something small. The anger didn't go away. It collected, quietly, until it couldn't be contained. The same happens with grief, with fear, with loneliness. You postpone the feeling. The feeling waits.
What you resist persists. What you look at disappears.
— Neale Donald WalschMost of us learned to suppress emotions early, and for good reason. Perhaps expressing sadness brought discomfort to the people around you. Perhaps anger was dangerous, or treated as weakness. Perhaps you grew up in an environment where the message — spoken or not — was that needs were inconvenient, that strong feelings were something to get over quickly.
Those were adaptive strategies. They helped you navigate the world you were in. The problem is that the nervous system doesn't automatically update when the world changes. You carry the old rules into new contexts, long after they've stopped being useful.
Here's what no one told most of us: you are allowed to not be fine, and your not-fine-ness is not a burden to the world. Difficult emotions are not signs of weakness or dysfunction. They are signs that you are a person who experiences things — which is to say, a person who is alive.
The feelings you've been postponing haven't disappeared. But they're not permanent either. Most emotions, when actually felt rather than suppressed, move through in a matter of minutes. It's the avoidance that makes them take years.
The cure for pain is in the pain.
— Rumi
My mental health journey began in 2016 when I received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. At that time, I was struggling with both my mental well-being and my physical health, as I was at my highest weight and battling the highs and lows of manic depression.
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-Celi ❤️
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