Physical Feelings
48 hours after Biden was declared the next President, I felt painfully miserable
Are you one of those who are feeling weirdly awful since Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election and the savior of humanity? Rachel Megan Barker is right there with you, and she has thoughts.
by Rachel Megan Barker
Forty eight hours after Joe Biden was declared the next President of the United States, I was on a walk and suddenly felt awful. I felt painfully miserable, in a way that hit me like a truck; the kind of sudden emotional pain that you feel if you get some really bad news out of the blue. It literally stopped me in my tracks.
But here’s the thing: nothing was wrong. At that moment, I had absolutely no “reason” to feel that way. And, after a second, I realised what I was feeling was a huge amount of adrenaline exiting my body all at once. For the weeks up until the election I had been running on pure adrenaline, and the days after, waiting for the results, weren’t much different.
And then suddenly we had a result. And whilst no longer being an adrenaline fueled, anxiety ridden mess might sound great, going from being in such a heightened place to not being there anymore led to that intense sadness.
And, of course, this was on top of finally being forced to face up to just how tired I was. Sadness squared is what exhaustion will cause.
But the thing about all of this is it was an emotional response to a completely physical experience. I wasn’t sad about anything. I was sad for purely chemical reasons. And there is a large part of me that wants to resist that reality.
I know I am not alone in feeling the need for emotions to have an underlying reason beyond just “body chemical stuff”; some sort of cause that relates to the things happening in my life. Not even, necessarily, particularly rational reasons; feeling upset just because of a TV show or because I am struggling to do a particularly difficult puzzle, or something else equally unimportant, doesn’t bother me. But the idea I feel things just because I am tired or hungry or because of some other purely physical phenomenon bothers me.
Mostly, I just don’t like the idea that what I feel, which feels (no pun intended) like a key component of who I am and how I interact with the world, can be so rootless; so devoid of meaning. How I feel about a situation is a key part of the whole experience of living through it - and having other emotions that are detached from concrete things around me feels wrong or less than.
And it’s not just negative emotions either. That upbeat music can make me feel happy for no reason other than it’s tripping a certain switch in my brain is a great life hack - but again, one that I often feel the need to resist because it just doesn’t feel real or genuine enough to me; the happiness isn’t really coming from anywhere meaningful.
It is also just annoying sometimes to feel one way or another and know that it probably is just a physical response, but not know what that response is to; it is easier, at least for me, to dig down into my psyche to find a reason why I am sad than know the issue is I am lacking in a certain vitamin or I have hit just the wrong point of the “staying caffeinated enough” spectrum, or whatever it may be.
But ultimately, something I have learned, and really am still in the process of learning, is that it is important for me to be able to know and acknowledge - and accept - when my emotions are caused by something physical. Because otherwise, if I feel bad, and that’s why, I will start looking for external reasons to justify the feeling. And if you feel sad or angry or whatever it is, and start looking for external reasons to feel those emotions, you will probably find them.
And that then means that alongside feeling bad because of whatever my body is doing, I have found external reasons to feel bad to heap on the “I feel bad” pile.
My emotions being beholden to my physical state might mess with my sense of humanity a little bit - but it’s better than allowing them to lead me to create a narrative telling me I should feel bad when I really have no reason for that.
Rachel Megan Barker is a political adviser in London.
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