On Being Unbearable

& accepting it

I have to admit… I don’t think I’m personally unbearable… It is simply something I have observed in others; their incredulity with me at times. I often feel people are teetering on different edges about me, a pendulum swinging from one feeling to the next; you either love me or hate me (and / or don’t know me) but I’ve come to realize that I’m quite polemical to some.

I still get embarrassed that I don’t have any filters (still, can you imagine?) and that I’m often prone to “oversharing” …I’m accepting, with reticence, that I am an over sharer, even though that title feels loathsome, and gendered. I wonder how much of the embarrassment I feel about myself every day has to do with the shame coded around the art of feelings. As Yvonne Rainier surmises in the title of her memoir, “Feelings are facts.” I don’t think this means they usurp fact, but, rather, feelings themselves are another data point, that provides another perspective, and thus another fact. Yet we rarely prioritize them as such. Isn’t it strange, how little we approach ourselves with curiosity? How little we humanize our own emotions, our own feelings as a fact.