Feelings aren't wrong

So today hasn’t been the best of days but that’s ok, life isn’t all good. Nothing major happened but I haven’t been sleeping well and today I was just generally feeling ”bleurgh”, physically and emotionally. The physical may in part be due to the fact that yesterday I decided to brave it and go for my first run in over a year! Seemed like a good idea at the time and I was quite chuffed with the 3km I managed but I am feeling it today...  Running is something I want to get back into though, I know people go on about the benefits of exercise on mental health all the time and I am kinda sick of hearing it myself but there is something to be said about the high you get after completing a run, or a workout etc, and in my more stable periods in the past, I have been quite physically active in my spare time. I just hope the pain that comes from having done the exercise wears off soon or I might get disillusioned 

I think the message that I will take away from today though is how much it helps to have someone to just listen in times of deep emotion.  I had an appointment this afternoon and totally out of the blue - like all trusty eupd emotions - came a sudden wave of overwhelming sadness. I started crying but I wasn’t even sure why, and then I kept on crying. On and off I was at it for the whole hour! But it didn’t matter. In fact, it was probably a good thing. Firstly because it shows a new way of letting out my emotions rather than getting angry or pissed off. Yes, I have talked about this before but this is the first proper test of if I can do it in the ‘real world’. (And apparently I can -yay!) But secondly, it showed me that it is ok to feel in itself.  I think that over time, a lot of EUPD sufferers can begin to believe that feeling things in response to stimuli is inherently wrong. I know I often felt like I shouldn’t be feeling the way I did about certain things, well to be honest, most things. The reason why I felt like that is because it was rare for me to be able to share my thoughts and feelings and the reasons behind them. To me, it just looked like everyone else wasn’t experiencing the extreme reactions that I was having and therefore it must be my feelings that were wrong. In fact, people probably were feeling similar emotions to mine but to a lesser, more normalised degree. Whilst I might be raging, they could have been irritated. What to me was sheer despair, to them could have been sadness. I wasn’t going around saying that their emotions were wrong, only mine.  Today though, somebody listened patiently whilst I broke down in tears and tried to describe how I was feeling.  They gave me time and space to talk and didn’t tell me that my reaction was disproportionate. That not only felt good but allowed me to make a step into the scary world of grey. It showed me that emotions aren’t black or white, good or bad, right or wrong, they just are. Yes, my emotions may be a little more extreme than most people’s but they’re not wrong, I have as much right to feel as anybody else and so too does everyone with a mental health condition! It’s odd because a lot came out of that appointment, most of which was far more straightforward than the aspect I just described but the fact that I was listened to and validated at a time of deep emotion made the biggest impression of all. I think more professionals need to take the time to do this with patients with a diagnosis of PD - we need it reinforcing, our feelings aren’t wrong.