Emotional Wholeness

emotional wholeness: (noun) the practice of allowing room for the full spectrum of your feelings; the decision to welcome your grief alongside your joy. 

It took me a long time to commit to getting mired, attached, or identified to any one emotion. 

For example, it’s easy to want to be joyful all the time. Our culture often encourages this, but if I try to stay only in the joy side of the emotional spectrum, ignoring my grief or my anger with a cheerful front, I often end up feeling hollow and brittle. 

In The Gifts of Imperfection, Dr. Brené Brown, one of my creative elders, says, “We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” In Rising Strong, Dr. Brown also adds, “Integration is the soul of rising strong. We have to be whole to be wholehearted. To embrace and love who we are, we have to reclaim and reconnect with the parts of ourselves we’ve orphaned over the years. We have to call back home all of those parts of ourselves that we have abandoned.” I first read her work and watched her articulate these concepts in my late twenties, and that process was pivotal.  

But I’ve lived with this practice all my life. My mother embodied this for me. As I describe in People Are Stories-in-Progress, my mother’s father died less than ten days after her eighteenth birthday. She was present when he passed. That major loss impacted the rest of her life, including my (mostly) happy childhood. 

My mother showed me that even though pain is a real and present force in your life, grief and joy can exist side by side. 

And as I’ve grown up, I’ve learned how wise she was to demonstrate that. 

So, that’s what I try to model here too: the pursuit of emotional wholeness. 

And for me, creativity is one expression of that pursuit.