Permission to Feel

Question: When was the last time you allowed yourself to fall apart?

No seriously. Think about it. When was the last time you just let yourself fully feel without rushing to immediately pull it back together?

To say life has felt like an emotional rollercoaster this season would be an understatement. For most of my life, I prided myself on being the one who had it together. So not having it together left me resenting my feelings even though they were valid.

I found myself saying I was good when I wasn’t and using toxic positivity to disguise the truth that I was unraveling.

Between being a Christian, a Black woman, and a recovering perfectionist, it hasn’t always felt like there was room for me to feel all of my feelings. But you can only hold it together for so long before it catches up to you.

For me, some of the byproducts of suppressing my feelings were:

• A hardened heart

• A limited capacity to connect

• An inability to let myself be seen

• A serious creative block

The most significant after-effect though, was the self-made wedge it drove between me and God. I subscribed to the false belief that if I was angry, I lacked faith, or that if I was scared, I didn’t know God for real.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 2 Corinthians 12:9

I was led to believe the lie that my feelings and faith could not co-exist.

But the truth is when we feel, we are functioning exactly as we were designed. The spectrum of emotions we get to experience is what makes us human. Being able to own those feelings is what helps us connect and take our power back: it prevents us from becoming slaves to our emotions.

Although we shouldn't submit to our feelings, we do need to feel them.

I believe that being able to feel your feelings is critical to your healing and growth because feelings are like check engine lights. They're indicators that there is something going on inside that needs your attention. But when you avoid that check engine light for too long, eventually other signals start to pop up on your dashboard & the price of the repair goes way up.

The good news is that God gives us permission to feel all of it and bring all of it to Him. He sees the frustration, the anger, the sadness, the fear, the happiness and understands it. He created us with the capacity to feel, after all.

Now I can finally see that the only one pressuring me to have it together is me.

So here is your invitation to feel all of it. Set some time aside and just feel. Lay down the idea that you have to be the "strong friend" or be "fine" 100% of the time. Your friends will be okay and you will be better for it, I promise.

Jesus wept. John 11:35

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