International Women's Day 2019: A Year of Hard Realizations

I looked back on last year's International Women's Day post and teared up a little bit at the words of love and encouragement I had for all my girls. All those words remain true and will always remain true because I have never found a more accepting community than the community that I have now.Some of the best memories I have from the past year has been because of my girls. The hardest lessons about myself I learned also because of my girls. Because of my friends, I have better curated my social media life and now my feed is comprised of women of all body types and skin tones. It used to be comprised mainly of conventionally thin white women. Ever since I've started following badass women of color, the way I've viewed my own body has changed. I work with my curves now, instead of berating it. I walk confidently into a room proud of the way my body looks! And suffice it to say, people take notice. Representation matters!However, some things are different this year than last year. I moved on from one emotionally unhealthy work situation to a different emotionally unhealthy work situation and it leaves me with very little hope for the industry in which I work in. We all live in the collective nightmare that is the Trump administration and listening to the news raises my blood pressure. Everyone in my life is going through it right now. So more often than not, from the moment I wake up, to when I go to sleep, from the first thing that is said to me to the last thing, I hear and experience negativity. And with that, I've come to the sad realization that I do not have the tools to cope.

Realizing that I was raised to be a robot

One of the best books I've read this past year is Rebecca Traister's book Good and Mad. It made me realize just how much of our anger we just swallow, ignore, or distract ourselves from. We're painted to be hysterical and untrustworthy when we even get a little bit upset. But the thing is, getting angry is a perfectly logical reaction when you've been insulted, belittled, dismissed, and made to feel worthless. So why are we shamed for reacting accordingly when we are insulted, belittled, or dismissed? Because there is power in women's anger. We now wake up to a world where when a women says she's been wronged, more and more people are believing her. This makes men very scared. They should be.This opened a can of worms for me, though. On the one hand, it was incredibly freeing to just feel whatever I wanted to feel and be justified in the fact that I'm reacting exactly how a person would react in this situation. On the other hand, I don't know how to deal with these emotions. I am a woman and I have actively been taught that my emotions and expressing those emotions is something I should not do.My father would explode at me as a child whenever I start crying. Any time I brought up the fact that I was dissatisfied with anything my male friends did or said, they would laugh and thoroughly dismiss everything I said as me being a "bitch again." So all I learned from this is that nobody is interested in my feelings. Better to just people please my way through life and grin and bear it no matter how I actually felt.But now as an adult, I know better. My parents are people and they may not have had the emotional tools to adequately deal with my emotions. My parents are immigrants to this country and their sole focus was getting me across the "college and job" finish line so I would not end up in a ditch penniless and starving. So my emotional well-being took a back seat. I understand how we arrived here. But I still have to deal with the fact that I am here. I was raised to do what is asked of me, do it well, and to do it without complaint. If I had grown up to be a robot, we'd be great. But I am not a robot. I am a human who has just realized that I am entitled to feel angry or sad when the situation calls for it. I give myself full permission to feel feelings but I don't know what to do about it.I just have these feelings. I'm angry for days. I'm depressed for days just holding on to these feelings. I never learned how to deal with them. How do I climb out of a rage spiral when my own father, when asked what I'm doing in my room, says I'm just laying here growing a fatter stomach? How do I claw myself out of sadness so deep that I don't talk to a single person for three whole days? And if I can't even healthily deal with my own emotions, how do I provide a healthy support system for the people that I love that are also going through it?

On figuring out what to do next

Obviously, therapy would be a great place to start. Talking to my friends is also an awesome idea. They're there for me and who would be better able to understand and help me than the people who have grown up with these same messages? But I have intense anxiety over naming my emotions because in my head, whenever I do, I go back to being eight years old and being spanked and yelled at for crying.I've done alright with talking about what I felt after it passed, after it's over. But I know that it would be a better idea to talk about it as it's happening. I have a fear about being that candid about my emotions because these days, I feel like a dam. As long as I don't talk about it, as long as I don't name it, the dam won't break. But if I start talking about it uninterrupted, let the full range of how I feel just roll out of my mouth, I know everything will rush out and I'll start crying. And I have a very deep fear of being seen crying, of being seen as weak or broken. Even with the people I trust implicitly never to dismiss or hurt me, I would rather break my own leg than to have them see me cry. As illogical as it is, I'm afraid of what comes at the other end of tears. Would it be dismissal? Would it be anger? Would the conversation turn and in the process, we won't even be talking about what's bothering me anymore and I'd just walk away feeling unheard?I don't know that I have a way to end this post in an uplifting tone. I suppose it's progress in of itself that I allow myself to feel honestly at all. I suppose it's progress that as the days go on, I wear my emotions on my face and I'm less and less inclined to hide it or grin and bear it. I sit here and question myself: What was the point of all this? You have no solutions? You're just whining? This has nothing to do with women's achievements and progress.But maybe, I argue, it does. We spend our whole lives being taught not to write pieces like these. This emotional content is silly and frivolous. CLEARLY WRITTEN BY AN UNSTABLE WOMAN. I believe women writing about their experiences candidly and putting it out there for the world to see is a revolutionary act. We are taught our whole lives not to put this information out there. Don't air out your dirty laundry, they say! But all that's doing is preventing other women from seeing that they're not the only one, separates us from each other, and prevents us from supporting and validating one another. Because as those in power are fully aware, when oppressed groups start supporting and bolstering one another, change happens.I have no solutions for myself. I am a work in progress. I have just fully accepted that I can't be okay all the time and that I am not a robot. AND THAT IT'S OKAY NOT TO BE OKAY! I'm still trying to figure this out. It's a hard and grueling process and I expect that it'll continue to be a hard process as women everywhere continue to fight to be counted as people. But if someone out there read this and feel their experiences mirrored in what I've written, I want you to know that you are not alone. You will get through it and you will see a better day. And maybe if I tell you that enough times, I'll start believing it for myself.