To Feel or Not To Feel

I didn’t expect to be healing a broken heart this summer. Mourning the loss of a love, turned friend, turned nothing. I broke up with my ex partner exactly three years ago, and at the time we decided we’d rather be in each others’ lives as friends than as nothing. I can picture your eyes rolling thinking that ex’s can’t be friends, but I thought it depended on the ex and the reasons behind an ending. Now, not having grieved the loss at the time, I am grieving both our relationship and our friendship all at once.

Bipolar, and living with OCD, I’ve always viewed our world in black and white, right and wrong, positive and negative. It’s literally in the title: the two poles. Thus, I found it extremely difficult to find the grey area, which is ironically where our love story began: Grey Area, Amsterdam’s premier coffee shop. For the first time since, I feel like I’m back in Grey Area, only this time the smoke isn’t in my eyes, it’s in my mind. How can I want to be with someone and not want to be with someone at the same time? To be both in and out of love simultaneously? When I ended our relationship I felt relieved. I knew it was the right decision: it was black and white. We weren’t working, so we had to break up. When I cried, it wasn’t about the loss of the relationship, it was because I knew I’d hurt someone I loved. I knew I had to prioritise my health, and I knew our relationship was detrimental to it. 

Growing up, my emotions were erratic. Until they were so erratic, that in the end I had nothing left. Nothing but numbness. Our minds are like the DJ booths I would creep into to check the song title: every mix can be done slightly differently with unlimited options of song choice, speed, volume, you name it. Our minds are the same way. No mix is the same, no mind is the same and diagnoses have scales of severity and idiosyncrasies - but when depression drops, the power goes out. There might be a couple of sparks, brief glimmers of hope, but until the power gets switched back on, there’s not much you can do. My ex was a spark in the darkness (that is, until we had both emotionally alienated one another for reasons the other was too stubborn to acknowledge) - coincidental, considering “spark,” is a metaphor for love.

Years later, our “spark,” now a friendship, was miraculously intact. And with a trio of badass women health professionals (that I am lucky enough to be able to afford - which is a subject matter for another article entirely) I am on the correct medication, and throughout the past three years, have ultimately and gratefully, regained my emotions. I feel like a kindergartener, having relearnt my emotions and identifying them whilst they’re happening, confirming to me that yes, Disney and Pixar are correct: Joy, sadness, anger, worry and disgust do in fact exist. And even in sadness and anger and worry and disgust, I can’t help but feel the underlying joy of knowing that I am experiencing emotion, to my intense delight and appreciation. A reminder of what I’d thought was an elusive dream before depression swallowed me whole, I welcomed all of these emotions back with open arms - except for one that I didn’t recognise.

At first, I thought depression had made its grand return, bursting through double doors fresh from a long holiday, which I had anticipated and felt ready to combat with my newfound therapeutic techniques. Depression is complex and I think of it as 2 octaves on a keyboard. Middle C is neutral. One octave below, I’m unable to move. One octave above, I’m able to function. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed experiences throughout my bouts of depression. I have treasured moments throughout my entire life. But once it’s triggered, it’s a part of you, and you live with it. Sometimes it’s below Middle C, sometimes it’s above. And when it’s that entire octave below, unable to move, the numbness consumes you. 

But this emotion was something different. I didn’t feel numb this time, I felt… broken, oh… heartbroken?! Regaining my privilege to feel meant additionally feeling this emotion that I’d only ever considered to be a metaphor. But just as I’ve experienced the literal feeling of numbness, I’m shocked to confirm that heartbreak is also literal, consuming my body in a different, but equally horrific way. I ache in places I thought were reserved for biological organs. 

I became an ultimate broken-hearted cliché, and no amount of furiously waving sage wands around my flat, or un-ironically re-watching “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” rid the pain that my OCD bully pulverised my brain with over and over again: the words I never thought I’d hear him say, wrapped in a name that wasn’t mine. I self-flagellated myself by prying, learning about his new someone. We’ve both had someones. But that’s the thing, she’s not just someone. Her name in his mouth hurt my stomach, my ego chakra, apparently, causing another literal effect: gastritis - which is not as gross as it sounds. There is no exiting of unwelcome bodily fluids, but nevertheless, being told you have gastritis is less than desirable when you have an Adonis look-a-like Dr. delivering your diagnoses. Though he quickly went from “Adonis” to “A demon,” when he told me I couldn’t have coffee or alcohol whilst healing from this latest ailment.

This was another confirmation that mental health directly correlates to physical health, adorned in ECG wires in A&E. The timing, all too incidental was soon after my heartbreak, combined with additional stress expressed through involuntary anxiety attacks. My tears were so heavy that I couldn’t breathe, and intense, acute pain resided just above my stomach. Immobile from sharp, unwavering pain, or immobile from emptiness, an octave below middle C - I can’t decide what’s worse: to feel or not to feel. 

What’s helped the most is exactly what I’m doing now, which has always been my saving grace: writing. Scribbling my vulnerabilities into notebooks or typing out my frustrations, I came to realise that I never processed my grief: my initial grief of losing someone I loved. It’s poetic justice that it took having my heart broken to confirm that I am the healthiest I’ve ever been mentally in my whole life. Before, if I cried, it was from exhaustion. Exhausted from trying to feel. And now I am feeling everything all at once. When I’m rational, I know his moving on is right. When I’m hysterical, I feel messy and blurry and confusing and uncontrollable. But that’s what emotions are: they’re messy and blurry and confusing and uncontrollable, one might even say, a grey area.

And I’m learning, gradually, that grey areas are an opportunity to explore nuances and imperfections. It’s an adjustment for my Bipolar brain, but I can apply what I’m learning to multiple situations and circumstances in life, which I am looking forward to experiencing.  

To feel or not to feel? That is the question. Maybe somewhere in between. Thank you, ex lover, for showing me the grey area.

Sarah is a singer, writer, producer and full time partner with Scheherezade Initiatives, a non profit that focuses on acclimating refugees to their new surroundings through theatre and dance. Sarah resides in London, UK and honors her American and Syrian heritage. You can read Sarah’s other article here; Scheherazoom! An Invitation. Artwork original provided by @goodstrangevibes