@ecotrain asked three questions last week, to be answered over three weeks:

1. What does it mean to own your emotions? (find last week's fabulous curation here, and please do give gratitude to @eco-alex for taking the time to put them together)
2. How open are you about your emotions?
3. Do you appreciate others to be open about their emotions?

It has been a really interesting exploration into our emotional lives and I highly recommend you undertake your own exploration of these questions.

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This post will attempt to explore the answer to Question 2:

'How open am I about my emotions?'

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It's going to be a rambling affair and to be honest I've not written this in flow - I've been working through it from the heart, and then going and editing and returning to the beginning with another sort of logic entirely, so if none of this makes sense, forgive me! There's a reason for this feeling of uncertainty which I hope to make clear at the end (ironically).

I can most definitely say I have an open heart.

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My whole life I’ve had people say to me that I’m an ‘emotional’ person and I have certainly recognised that as a truism – so much so I have a heart tattooed on the inside of my forearm as if to say, yep, I feel with my heart, live from this deeply emotional centre of me and I’m proud of that. It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I can say, yes, I’m an emotional sort and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. I need my heart, because without my heart, where's my head?

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve told this story before on the blockchain but my Dad said to me a few months back that the family would be very different without my emotional energy. This meant a lot, because I have always felt the odd one out in the family because I seem to be the only one that operates in this way. The rest of the family are quite rational, logical and calm people. In fact, I surround myself with calm, grounded and rational people as a counter balance for my airy, deeply emotional side. Clearly, I intuitively needed the rational in my life, whilst being quite open about my emotions at the same time.

My heart side feels things deeply. I'm moved by nostalgia, literature, films, poetry. I feel things deeply, and have an incredible amount of empathy to the point it's actually screwed with the nerves that run up the back of my legs - if I see you've cut yourself, I get all these violent electric shocks from buttock to knee and have to stomp my leg to calm them down, much to J's amusement. I've also been prone in my life to get really carried away in tides of feeling - passion, anger, jealousy, rage. I've been consumed by anxiety and depression, resulting in a nervous breakdown a few years ago that really changed everything, in a wonderful way. I've also been enticed by many dark sides and loved travelling, as I loved throwing my heart into new experiences and feeling them with all my heart.

“The heart is a strange beast and not ruled by logic.” ― Maria V. Snyder, Touch of Power

Perhaps my emotional self, however, was not an unrestrained beast so much but a kind of emotional intelligence that is part of my DNA. I've always been rather good at feeling. And I've learnt that there's nothing really wrong with that at all - it's what J. loves me for, after all. 'Babe', he'd say to me, with an incredulous laugh, 'how can having such a loving heart be a bad thing?'

How extraordinary it is to find the thing you thought was kinda odd and wrong is actually a really nice part of who you are, and something people really appreciate. And, like the following quote attests, it's because I've been really openly emotional that I've been able to heal in the first place and eventually detach from the worst of the violent and damaging emotions.

“Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’.”
― Mitch Albom

I've always been one for putting myself in a situation where feeling is inevitable - if I don't feel, then who am I? Thus, I've exposed myself more times than I can count, and entirely risked rejection so many times (and been rejected too) but through doing this, I've also enriched my life quite a bit - I can look back on the life I've lived and feel happy that I put myself out there as I have had far more rewarding and enrichiing relationships (with lovers as well as friends) that I can look back on and smile and remember.

It's this emotional openness that paved the way for me and J. hooking up too - and I think because he was emotionally open as well, we both just clicked. Neither of us were cautious - and although we'd both been hurt, we were both impulsive and didn't need time to build trust. When we met we ended up snuggled under a duvet together on a friends couch by the end of the night, and within three days we'd said I love you, and within a year we were married - a ridiculously hasty and impulsive choice but one that we're thankful for as fifteen years later we're still in love with no signs of that abating. If I hadn't been emotionally open, would we have clicked?

I might be really open about my emotions but I also must recognize I also have a logical side and thus refuse to be defined as wholly an 'emotional' sort - it's not that easy to pigeonhole me! Being both rational and emotional gives me a flexibility that can cope with new situations with fresh perspectives - I'm not a rigid thinker at all and some might say this makes me creative. I'd be happy to take that, because I don't think I can pin myself down and say I'm 'either' / 'or'.

Thus it was my rational side that really was bugging me when I was trying to answer this question. What the hell does any of this mean?

What I really wanted was to say 'very' and be done with it. That was J. humourous response anyway. So I confess to took to the internet and discovered this fun quiz, which confirmed my thinking about my openness and led me toward a clearer answer to this question.

Turns out that emotional openness is really just one facet to a whole lot of other areas in which we can be open. This makes a lot of sense to me!

https://www.truity.com/test/how-open-are-you

It was actually a really interesting quiz to do and both J and I scored highly for emotional openness. It turns out that many of the interests that suit this kind of personality defined us perfectly - intellectually curiosity, interests in arts and sciences, looking beyond facts for higher level of understanding, a high degree of creativity and interested in intellectual disciplines and abstract concepts. We were both adventurous and got bored easily, and seek out stimulating environments, are politically liberal and open to new and conventional ideas, and we're pretty non-judgmental, unless we're judging more conservative types, which we can't relate to and see as damaging the world.

So, this quiz let me to realise that of course I was so frustrated as I tried to grapple with this response! I can't say I have an open heart without saying that I have an open mind! So I'm both - I am open with my emotions (heart) but also open with my mind!

The two are not mutually exclusive.

And in fact, it's what many people argue is necessary to change the world! Gah! Self criticism! Who needs it! Turns out I was on the right track after all!

This therefore draws me to the conclusion I was beginning to feel intuitively a few paragraphs back.

I'm emotionally open, very, but also rationally open - and I can't separate the two things. And I'm rather really pleased and happy about that.

What about your good self? Are you emotionally open or are you like me and find it hard to pigeon hole yourself like this? I'd love to hear about what you think about this question, and encourage you to respond to the QOTW for the benefit of us all here on the steem blockchain!

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