So much happens in 365 days of my life it's hard to imagine reviewing an entire year in a single post.
Thus when The Kitty Girl suggested the following prompts this week in the Ladies Of Hive Community I thought, "I can do that!".
Here was what she wrote:
1️⃣ What was your greatest joy of 2022...?
And / Or
2️⃣ What was your greatest sorrow of 2022...?
In this post, I'll answer both. But first a quick lesson on how to get more in touch with your own genuine emotions, also known as becoming more emotionally intelligent. After all, this post is about emotions and this is something I know rather a lot about and it's something a lot of people struggle with.
On Hive, as well as with my own family and, of course, with my clients I see many, many people who are not okay with being with their sorrow. Call it sadness, call it grief, call it any name you like but know that it's the thing you feel when you've lost something (or someone) or are missing something (or someone) that you wish was still in your life.
Most of us aren't good at fully feeling our sorrow/sad feelings because so many of us have been taught "not to cry".
Maybe we were told to "cheer up" by a well meaning parent or berated for "being a cry baby" by an older sibling or taught "you'll need to toughen up if you're going to survive out there" by a teacher or sports coach.
But one thing is pretty much guaranteed: if you struggle to find anything to be sorrowful about or are very quick to reframe and "look for the positive" or you know you just can't be with your sorrow then at some point in your past, even if you can't remember it, someone communicated to you that sadness was not okay, was not allowed or was not safe.
For the longest time I was distracting, reframing, squashing my sadness. I would go years and years and years without crying. And I could never have told you what caused me sorrow in any given year. But now, after slowly, deliberately making it safe to feel my sadness I can cry again.
It's such a f*cking relief to be able to cry, yo!
I highly recommend it... when you're in the company of someone who will just calmly, patiently, gently let you be a big snotty crying mess.
So, what was my greatest sorrow in 2022?
Since no one I love died then I don't think I have one great sorrow for the year. Rather I have a series of times that caused me to feel sad enough to bawl my eyes out.
One of those times was when I realised how far away I was from my brother and nephew. We were on our way to visit them. There had been a difficult phone conversation that was hard on everyone that ended in me being hung up on. I thought about how little control I had in being able to see my younger brother who I adore and my less-than-one-year-old nephew.
Thankfully, by the time we got there everyone was coping a bit better and the visit went well.
Which brings to one of the moments this year that brought me a lot of joy: holding my nephew for the first time in his life.
I'm sure I have no idea what the greatest joy of my 2022 was but hugging my nephew was definitely up there along with hugging my very tall younger brother, walking and talking with my sister and hugging my mum after not seeing them for almost nine months.
All these interactions were all amazing.
Joy, it's another emotion people can struggle with. Usually we recognise how much people (including perhaps ourselves) struggle with feeling so-called negative emotions (sadness, anger, fear, etc) but we don't necessarily realise that many people (including perhaps ourselves) struggle to feel and express the so-called positive emotions.
{Side note: Since all emotions are useful, valid and naturally occurring there are, in my mind, no "positive" or "negative" emotions. However there are ones that can feel bad and we might have been taught that they're bad and so they get labelled as negative. The same is true with the "positive" emotions, but sorrow is just as valid and just as important as joy.}
Joy is another emotion I struggled with for the longest time. In fact, I'm sure I still have a long way to go with feeling fully safe to feel really joyful. This is common when you have parents who weren't okay with feeling their own joyful happiness with what life can offer. Joy can get shut down, and often does, in small children when they are too big, too excited, too much.
So if you, like me, also struggle to really let yourself feel all those joyful, happy, excited feelings about anything in life that lights you up, know you're not alone.
And more importantly that over time you can expand into greater joyfulness by spending more time with others who also express their joy. If they're safe and comfortable with their big happy feelings then there's a good chance that they'll be alright with making space for yours too.