Feeling all the Feels (and some art journaling)

Hello lovely.

“Sometimes we just have to stop and sit with our feelings.”

I recently wrote this in my phone’s notes app one morning. It’s a lesson I learned sometime last year when I was sitting deep in the mud of my own emotions. But I was thinking about “adulthood” recently and I’ve come to realize how there are very few adults in this world.

(I just want to note here that my definition of adult is probably very different from yours, but by definition, an adult is “a person who is fully grown or developed” and I don’t think the majority of us are fully grown or developed. Maybe physically we are “adults” but mentally and emotionally, a lot of us just aren’t.)

And that’s not a bad thing per se, but I feel like the majority of adults walking around this earth are just big kids who haven’t quite dealt with their developmental wounds—”childhood traumas” or however you want to call them. They haven’t embraced their inner child, which a lot of times is simply calling out for attention and help. Most people simply ignore the pleas of their little selves and I think this is because no one likes to sit with their feelings. No one likes to feel their feelings—especially hard feelings—and understand them. Most people would rather escape into their work or into pleasure and a lot of people run away or shut down altogether.

But I’ve found that it does your soul a lot of good to sit in the pool of mud your emotions create.

Feel all the feelings. Let them pass through you.

Pay attention to where these feelings are and why they keep coming up. Once you’re able to confront your emotions this way and try to understand them, you’ll soon figure out how to regulate and move past them in a healthy way. You’ll discover the pattern you’ve cultivated your entire life and you’ll finally figure out a way to break it.

But it takes a lot of work. And I think once people begin to actively work on themselves in this way, they lessen the chance of hurting themselves and other people.

Because hurt people hurt people.

I think it’s time we all sat with our feelings. Just remember that it’s okay. Little you will thank you for it one day.

I also wanted to share what I’ve been creating lately in my journal. I’ve been loosely following along with Junk Journal July and using the prompts as jumping-off points for some art journal spreads. It’s been really nice to be getting messy again after such a long dry spell.

Now I’m not going to lie, I think most of my pages are pretty shit, but bad art is still art. I’m playing with my supplies and creating something. I just wish I had more time to dive deep into it like I used to. Now I just use little pockets of free time I find throughout my days to do a little something—whether that’s adding paint to a page, making some marks, or collaging ephemera pieces. A lot of these pages came together in various 5-10 minute increments throughout my busy days.

I’ve been enjoying the process and honestly, that is all that really matters.

xx Tiffany