Feeling emotions is really amazing


posted | about 3 minutes to read

tags: gender identity emotions

Last Friday, Sarah and I were at home, in the computer room. Very standard night, Mola wandered in and was sleeping on her favorite pillow, and in general we were just taking it easy and winding down for the weekend. I think maybe we were watching a hockey game, I can’t really remember now. What I do remember is looking back at Mola and just feeling really happy that she was here. Like, really happy. And then the next moment I just found myself in tears with how pure and strong that emotion was.

This was…a really first-time experience for me. I can’t think of a time that I ever felt something that strongly before, ever. And that sent me right into another bunch of happy crying over just being able to feel emotions - just so overwhelmed at not just how it felt but at how much I was feeling.

I’m going to pause there for a moment, because that’s a hard concept to grasp, I think. The best I could come up with: imagine if your emotions were on a volume control, and that volume control was stuck on 10% literally your entire life, and then all of a sudden it got turned up to 100%. That is what this was like. Sarah suggested suddenly being able to see a color that you couldn’t see before, which is pretty good too. It was a really eye-opening thing for me, just from the perspective of “oh, this is what this is supposed to be like!”

This went on for, like, an hour. Kept thinking about different stuff that would set me right back off. Like, at one point I was calming down a little bit and then I told Sarah how much I appreciated how supportive she’s been through this whole thing and that just turned the faucet back on. It seems like puberty is going to be a heck of a wild ride - again, I guess, but I’m excited for it this time. (Actually, on the “puberty” note, I did also get to experience another Fun Part of Womanhood a few nights ago when I whacked a boob on a doorframe. Turns out that hurts a lot more after being on estrogen for a month! Like, they’ve been sore off and on for the last few days anyway, but this was on a whole different level - I’m going to have to relearn 28 years of movement patterns and pain expectation, I guess.)

The one other thing that stood out to me about all of this was how genuinely positive it felt. Like, sure, through the whole thing obviously there were a ton of emotions, but even after I started to calm down a bit, there was this nice glow of happiness left over afterwards. I was never really a crier before, but the few times I did cry, I certainly wasn’t left with a feeling like that.

I think the whole “feeling and being able to express emotions” thing’s manifesting itself here a bit more, too. Like, I feel like I want to talk about life and emotions and what I’m doing a lot more - not just in the moment, but in a more general sense. Like, blogging used to be just “something I did to keep my web presence alive” - or, if not that, very technical-minutiae-focused as opposed to more of a personal platform - and it’s become a thing that I’m genuinely eager to do. That’s a very exciting thing for me from a personal perspective, being able to actually talk about this stuff more openly, and I’m thrilled to be able to have a platform to do that here.