The Emotional Leash

In this world, there is rapture and beauty, pain and regret, joy and love, desire….for  what you have and for what you don’t.  And sometimes, I feel these emotions so keenly, it’s as if all my skin were gone and every nerve ending I possess is alight with feeling.  And then there are times when I’m dead inside and I remember.  I remember the emotion, good and bad, and I’d give anything just to feel…anything.

This world allows certain emotions.  We are "allowed" to feel certain things and certain emotions are acceptable under certain circumstances.  But I don’t want to live in that box.  I don’t want those restrictions.

If an emotion is felt so strongly for, I believe it should be allowed to be physically responded to and not held in check.  The obvious exceptions to that are things that are morally wrong such as anger resulting in assault or violence and desire resulting in rape, those types of things.  But, for instance, say you are watching the Lion King, where Mufasa dies.  The empathy you feel for this character that results in sadness should not be dampened.  Sure, some people cry at this part, but how many others WOULD be crying if they weren’t holding that emotion in check?  It is acceptable for women to cry moreso than men and I don’t think that is fair.  There is a stigma against crying as well, for either gender.  There are times when it is acceptable and times when it is not, but if an emotion strikes someone, sometimes it is so powerful that it manifests itself in tears, not necessarily out of sadness.  And I think it is uneccessarily stressful to struggle with hiding the evidence of powerful emotions.  Unless of course, you’re not wearing waterproof eyeliner that day and you are worried about messing up your makeup.  >.>  There’s part of the problem.  Society is too worried about appearances.  But you all know that already.