Emotional Repression

May snuck up on me this year, and as usual, my birth month has given me a lot to think about. I've been near drowning in melancholic emotions at times. But I'm *trying* to just let myself feel them. To not fight the waves. Which is scary, given I've been pulled under too many times already.

Birthdays leave me with a mess of sad memories and fear of the future. They leave me on edge. Exposed. Vulnerable. Even more than usual. My fears are elevated. My panic is easier to reach. Things trigger me more than usual. So, of course, part of me would rather try to repress, ignore, and distract my way out of that. It's a natural defense mechanism.

And sometimes those things are necessary in the short-term to survive. But over time, repression just makes it more likely for those emotions to fester under the surface and cause more damage later. Especially when your emotions tend to be as intense as mine.

I've always been an emotional person. It's been core to both my personality and creative process. But somewhere over the last five years or so, I've become so afraid of my intense sadness and panic attacks turning into agonizing episodes of darkness - as has happened many times - that I've instinctively started to repress. And it's left me feeling, for the first time since early childhood, that I'm not being authentic to myself.

I've been avoiding the same emotions that used to fill me with vivid creative visions demanding to be expressed. And my creativity has been suffering lately. I believe the two are linked. Feeding off of each other. Not creating can be painful. Making me feel closed up. But repressing other emotions makes it harder to connect to the creative parts, as well. It's a cycle I need to break.

But I'm not sure how.