Catharsis and Poison

If you want to poison yourself—especially your heart, and I do mean your physical organ—nothing does it quite so well as refusing to give your emotions voice.

Maybe you don’t want to pay the immediate cost. Maybe you think you’ll get fired. Maybe you think it’ll be the end of your relationship. Maybe you just don’t have the energy to deal with it.

Maybe you’re afraid of your emotions, of how violent they seem and of what people might think of you if they knew how violently you feel. Maybe you’re ashamed.

There is a thing white people do, and I’m going to pick on us for a minute: we find overt displays of emotion disgusting, or uncivilized, or uncouth, or insert your negative adjective here. We look down on people who display their emotion.

The rest of the world finds this funny, because white cultures are incredibly violent—in a passive aggressive way.

Culturally, white people are taught to suppress, deny, and sublimate their emotions instead of expressing them directly, especially when those emotions are ‘negative’ or vehement. We’re taught a strong emotion is inherent violence, and violence makes us less good.

And we have to be good, don’t we.

I have good news for you, if you’ve been taught that: catharsis does not require witnesses.

Go out to the woods and scream everything that comes to mind when you get angry. Go break plates and swear. Press your pillow to your face and scream out the raw, vicious emotions that trouble you.

It beats a heart attack, and you will find that venting your emotions makes it a lot easier to think.