Oh emotions. As a kid, I don’t think I was ever good at expressing myself — mostly because I was always running from place to place.
My life was a lot of wash, rinse, repeat. Not in a bad way, just in a very structured way.
On weekdays, I would wake up, eat breakfast, migrate to school, have a 7-hour school day, go to practice, drive home, eat family dinner, and go to sleep.
Within that regular structure of living, I don’t remember having a lot of emotions that were loud enough to be noticed by the external world — partially because I didn’t even notice them in my internal world. I was solely focused on training and becoming a better athlete.
But in the summer, that routine changed and so did my emotions.
What’s On Deck:
Setting the Stage
Every summer until I started playing competitive volleyball around eighth grade, my brother, mother, and I would pack our bags and head to the beach.
It wasn’t just any beach though. We had a condo on Hutchinson Island in Stuart, Florida. A little tiny beach town that my brother and I had fondly called purgatory.
You might think that’s cruel but we were constantly surrounded by old individuals with silver hair who were grumpy and mad that happy children were around, even on the best days.
But the grumpy old people who no longer understood what joy sounded or looked like are not the point of this blog.
I always felt a sense of calmness and joy at the condo. Sometimes it was mixed with competition and anger trying to figure out who could shower first after a long day on the water — but that’s just regular sibling struggles. And they were lighthearted at their core.
Outside of the regular arguments as we got acquainted with sharing a room with bunk beds for two months, my brother and I settled into a more grounded routine.
We spent almost every day outside — unless it was raining — playing in the sun, salt, and sand, eating raw cookie dough as a midday snack while we took a break from swimming.
All of my memories of the condo bring back warmth and joy, wishing days could be that simple again. But as life progressed and the joy found in spending hours in the ocean became a distant memory each fall through spring, I was in a hidden battle with one emotion that was always louder than the rest: anger.
My Close Personal Relationship With Anger
In my regular, in-season life, I was going through the motions; more worried about volleyball practice than anything else.
I love that sport. It was my refuge, my outlet, my personality, and everything else. I always used to tell myself that if they took school away, I wouldn’t care as long as I could play. And that was immensely true.
On the especially rough days, I couldn’t wait to smack the everloving shit out of a volleyball — physically exhausting myself so the emotions running through my head and my veins would be so tired they wouldn’t come out to play when I laid my head down at night.
I was continually fighting an unseen war with the pent-up rage that lived inside me. It was always easy to access and ready to be applied to any situation if I felt wronged; or more frequently, if someone was being an asshole to one of my friends.
I am fiercely loyal and ready to defend those I love most. That has never changed.
But as a kid, that anger was mixed with (what I know now is) an internal knowing of people’s true souls and intentions. I could see through bullshit a mile away before it ever crossed their lips.
That misunderstood superpower as a kid didn’t make it easy to find friends.
I called people out on their shit and was ready to walk away from a relationship in a hot minute if they didn’t play their cards right. I knew I didn’t want to be near crappy people with bad intentions, but in high school, the vast majority are new people that I hadn’t gotten to know yet.
I did my best to keep to myself and hang with the boys because I didn’t have to worry about being girly or too nice or anything else except myself — even if that version of me was sarcastic, independent, and a little rough around the edges.
When it came to having friends that were girls, I found them confusing. I didn’t understand all the emotions and their obsession with boys.
Mostly because a lot of them were obsessed with boys that I knew and found supremely annoying or family friends who looked at me like the annoying younger sister no one could get rid of.
Living in a sea of people that I didn’t really get along with on a genuine level, I floated around from friend group to friend group, never really settling in one place.
I didn’t feel seen or included most of the time. But that made me work harder to make sure I didn’t blow up at the wrong people.
My desire to keep the few friends I had resulted in muffling some of my thoughts, feelings, needs, and emotions to people please and keep my group from getting perpetually smaller.
How I Used to Handle Toxic Relationships
For those whom I had no desire to hang out with any further, I kept my distance. But there are a couple of instances where they poked the proverbial bear and that resulted in fairly aggressive, final conversations or confrontations.
One specific example from college is burned into my brain.
Do I regret what I did? No.
Did it make me popular with my existing group of friends? Fuck no.
Would I change what I said looking back on it now? Nope.
Although I have a long list of examples that I wish hadn’t ended up that way, I had no problem walking away from things or people that no longer served me. It didn’t matter to me that I only had a handful of friends because they were amazing friends — two of which, I’m still close with today.
But after a while of getting not-so-stellar responses from acquaintances and the continual “you can’t be mean or cut off everyone so easily” talks from my parents, I silenced my internal guidance system.
That continual pressure to suppress what I was feeling — since it only showed up in rage blended with figuring out who I was in the world — left me confused and disconnected from my feelings and emotions.
I felt like what was coming up was authentic when it came to choosing the people I was spending time with but I was a kid and still learning how to exist in the world.
For years, I sat in that bubbling cauldron ready to explode at whoever poked the bear too many times.
And trust me, when that bomb went off, it wasn’t a reckless explosion of emotions. It was precise, accurate, and mean because all I knew how to do was release that inner knowing in a way that destroyed someone else’s understanding of how they show up in the world.
Most of the time, I held up a metaphorical mirror showing them just how screwed up they’ve been or how they’ve crossed the line — and although I usually wasn’t wrong about my assessments that I dished out to a select few in thick reams of fury, it wasn’t something I had control over once someone failed my three strike system.
And the come down? Took much longer than I’d ever like to admit.
I didn’t like not having control over my emotions. It felt like I couldn’t handle what was going on and keeping it bottled up, under control, and out of sight was the only thing I knew how to do.
And I did it damn well until I didn’t.
Turning to Exercise to “Manage” My Emotions
I played competitive sports to get out of my head and into my body while giving me a healthy outlet to channel my anger. Plus I’m athletic and love sports. I had been involved in some sort of sport pretty much since the day I could walk.
In the world of sports though, when anger came to play, I succinctly showed up on the court with a sense of finality.
If I was over a long point, I could make it end in our favor. If I was angry some girl hit me in the head with a volleyball during serving warm-ups, their heads were on chopping blocks and there was no way we weren’t winning that match.
When applied appropriately, my anger on the volleyball court was a well-honed weapon. Getting angry in that environment was beneficial.
It helped me think clearer and swing harder. It gave me this competitive edge that allowed me to fling myself across the court for hard-to-reach balls or launch into chairs to keep a point alive.
My dad was always curious about how that “flip got switched” and how I could get better at flipping the switch when I wanted to create better results on the court.
But what I never understood and definitely didn’t have the heart to tell him was I can’t control my anger. It shows up when it wants to and I deal with it.
On the volleyball court, anger appeared in its most useful form. It helped me show up as the competitive human I was inside in a way that was valuable and positive.
Off the court, I was just gunnysacking everything that was going on, waiting to get on the court to release what I was avoiding. This went on for years.
Losing Volleyball and Finding Myself
After I graduated from Florida State University, I stopped playing volleyball. I had grown to love sand volleyball in school and missed playing indoor but I wasn’t as angry as I used to be.
I was no longer an angsty teen that needed an outlet but I also had no idea who I was without a sport to add to my personal title.
I had been playing for over eight years, essentially non-stop. I had a couple of weeks off here and there each year, but the majority of each of those years was filled with sounds of whistles, calling the ball, court shoes screeching on shiny wood floors, screams of comradery, and my love for the game.
Stepping into the “real world” drastically changed how I could handle my emotions.
My favorite coping mechanism for my anger was no longer available to me.
Luckily, I loved lifting weights. Exercise became my outlet of choice which was still very healthy. I wasn’t as primed and ready to blow as I had been in my past but I still felt things very deeply.
I assumed everyone did. I felt like an outsider not being able to control my emotions as well as everyone else. And that stayed true for many years.
But with losing volleyball, I started to sit with myself and my emotions more. I was forced to confront what was happening internally and why.
I learned that I wanted to cry, a lot, after moving to Atlanta after college because although I was living in what used to be my Mimi’s house, I knew deep down Atlanta was not somewhere I was supposed to be for long.
It was not the town for me. But the comforting walls of Mimi’s house allowed me to process the grief I bottled up after losing her when I was half a world away in Australia for the summer heading into my senior year of college.
I’ll save that story for another day.
But living in Mimi’s house allowed me to process her passing as well as the passing of all my other grandparents who died before her. The floodgates were opened and I couldn’t close them.
I was forced to ride out the wave and hope that the other side was better than where I had just come from.
The Beginning of Healing My Relationship with My Intuition
Throughout the years of pushing down my rage and ignoring the little red flags in people that were so obvious to me just in the effort of making and keeping friends, I slowly shattered my relationship with my intuition.
I didn’t understand why anger was simmering so closely to the surface but as time went on and life forced me to take a good hard look at myself in the mirror, I slowly cracked open the scars that were keeping me tethered to anger and turmoil.
As brief as they were, those little glimmers of insight into the scars that left their mark on my soul were also helping me reignite my relationship with my intuition — the wisest version of myself who knew what I needed the most.
It wasn’t fun and I was still living in chaos but I was making progress little by little, inch by inch, through tear after tear.
As I faced random emotions, stress hives, heightened anxiety, loneliness, and so much more, I got better at sitting still long enough to figure out what was really going on.
Gone were the days of just feeling an emotion, getting swept up in it, and waiting for the joy ride to end abruptly then sleeping it off out of pure exhaustion.
But the truth of the matter was that I was not in the right environment to really get to know myself and heal the deepest parts of me. I hated Atlanta and knew a year and a half was already too long for me to live in an area where everything was so on edge 24/7.
Road rage happened all around me. Theft. Insane traffic. Horrible Uber kidnapping stories. It was all too dark and I was absorbing all of it by association. I had my own dark inner world to explore, I didn’t need to get swept up again in everyone else’s issues.
I wasn’t sure where I needed to go next and I definitely had no idea where I actually wanted to go next. But amidst all of this emerging internal discovery, I visited a friend in Charlotte, North Carolina for New Year’s.
The weather was crappy but it didn’t matter. The little pockets of Charlotte that I saw reminded me of Melbourne, Australia in the best ways possible. It checked off all my boxes: aka walkability, bagel shops, and nice people that said hello instead of giving you scowls like you aren’t supposed to be at the neighborhood grocery store.
My checklist was short but I was drawn to Charlotte for reasons I didn’t understand, but I wasn’t going to push my intuition away this time.
The Leap of Faith
I started applying for jobs left and right in the Charlotte area and even made a trip up for a week to go on some interviews. The process was exhausting since I didn’t have much traditional work experience. My first and last job in ATL was far from conventional…think of a toxic start-up environment but worse.
After weeks of applying, I booked a Zoom interview with a company located in Uptown Charlotte. They were hiring writers for an SEO website writing position that required the skills that I actually did possess: writing and a genuine interest in SEO.
After three rounds of interviewing all over the phone or through a computer, I accepted the job offer and had a start date that was just over two weeks away.
In anticipation of getting a job in Charlotte, I had already started looking at apartments. I had my eye set on one that seemed perfect. I reached out to the leasing office, got a quote, and let them know I was still on my search for a position.
The woman I was emailing with was very understanding of my situation and luckily for me, they hadn’t had too much interest in the apartment before I walked onto the scene. I was DEAD SET on this apartment without even stepping foot in it but I had always wanted a studio apartment.
And before you cringe, this studio apartment was not like others. It had a half wall between the bedroom and living space, 13ft ceilings, a balcony, a tub, and built-in shelving in the closet. It was listed as a one-bedroom apartment but the layout was divine.
After weeks of searching and interviewing, I was extended a job offer! I was so relieved I almost puked. The next day, my mom and I hopped in the car to go tour the apartment I had been obsessively looking at for weeks.
Plus, mama always feels better when she knows where I’m laying my head at night so it was important to bring her along with me.
The second I stepped inside this apartment, I fell in love. I filled out an application, got approved, and the rest you can say is history.
If I didn’t trust my gut feeling that Charlotte was somewhere I needed to be, I wouldn’t have found my dream apartment, my soul dog, or myself without the anger I had been carrying around my entire life.
It’s scary to think where I would be today if I didn’t trust that little voice inside.
My Emotions Today
After years of work — and an ongoing commitment to do what’s best for me regardless of what that looks like — I’ve quieted the chaos in my mind, healed most of my anger, and am stepping into my best life one day at a time.
Today, I openly cry at TV shows because I’m insanely empathetic — the same goes for movies too. I can tell others how I feel without showing up only in anger. I understand why I was so angry for all those years. I have a deeper knowing of how I show up and interact with the world around me.
I’ve successfully healed a lot of the really damaged parts of myself that I had been running away from. And although the path was painful, it was worth it.
I still have a long way to go but cultivating a relationship with my intuition and my inner world has led me to some pretty fucking amazing experiences.
I hope by sharing pieces of my most vulnerable self with you, my dear reader, I can continue to heal while inspiring you to get connected with your most authentic self because that version of you is filled with peace, calmness, insight, and unconditional love that you absolutely deserve.
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