What creates emotional turmoil, and how to calm it down?

People wonder how I am always so calm, given that I am an Aries and all. I can get angry, I get passionate, and I get excited, but deep within, I am always calm. My BASE is well set. The reason: I will study the truth. I will never argue against what is a fact. I don’t try to bury my head in the sand and imagine things to be different from what they are. I am not afraid to look at things the way they are, fearing they’d be even worse than they seem, or that reality would break my fantasy… or that reality wouldn’t live up to my fantasy of it.

And I don’t try to calm myself; if I’m angry, I’m angry; if I’m sad, I’m sad; if I feel whatever, I’ll feel it. There is no right feeling to be experiencing except the authentic one.

The emotional turmoil that people feel is when your reality is fighting your fantasy. You want things to be a certain way, but your logical mind tells you you’re fooling yourself. You may also know that you have a habit of denying the truth, and you’re not sure if you’re doing it this time or not, so you’re kind of trying to see things from between your fingers, covers pulled over your head, wearing sunglasses in the closet you’re hiding in. And then, everything you see creates terror in you.

“Thinking positively” can be freaking toxic.

You wouldn’t think I don’t ever try to think positively when you see me walking streets grinning ear to ear. My life may be crap, but I’m still laughing. Why might you ask? Because I KNOW what it is. I look at things and accept negatives as negatives, and positives as positives, and I try to work out a way to reduce the negatives and make more of the positives.

Thinking positively in the wrong way is a practice in which you deny the existence of the negatives and fool yourself into thinking they will go away on their own. The right way to think positively is this: There may be problems that I can see, but I’ll find a way to fix them or find another way forward. I’ll handle whatever I see.

Start from whatever is trying to draw your attention.

Don’t fight the problems that try to force themselves into your awareness. Look at them. Ponder at them. See the problems, the negatives, the issues at hand. The most urgent thing is going to try and make itself to the front of your mind, and that’s where it should be.

Do not forcefully turn your attention to things; allow your mind to wander. Allow yourself to think the thoughts that are trying to make yourself think. Stop blocking your thoughts from your mind, they freaking live there, and you’re being mean by not letting them back into their house, right?

What if nobody truly loves you?

Imagine that question, which might worry some of you. Ask yourself that question.

I mean, it’s possible that nobody truly does. Who knows, maybe they don’t. Do you know what that spells out? FREEDOM. New opportunity. It means you get to go fall in love with other people.

Maybe it means something else to you.

Don’t be afraid to be sad and depressed.

This, I say with a level of caution: I am not a mental health professional in the legal sense, so I am not qualified to advise you on this, but give it a whirl:

If you tell yourself that the sadness and depression you’re feeling is a fault in your brain, why the heck would you try and fix it cognitively or by changing your circumstances? It is the WORST idea to tell people, as far as I’m concerned, that their depression or sadness isn’t a reaction to the circumstances of your life, but a fault in your wiring so to speak.

And yes, some people tolerate the thing you’re going through better than you do, but you’re not some people; you’re you. What makes you crawl on the walls is another person’s happy life. You are not supposed to find happiness the same way some random classmate from grade school did.

You’re only going to remain in your sadness if you think you’re powerless against it. You won’t PROCESS it if you think it’s something that should go away on its own, and if it doesn’t, you’ll just pop some pills, right?

No, you have to focus on your sadness for a while. Let it wash over you. Sure, people will worry, but… Let me tell you a story.

The most unexpected rescue.

A friend of mine – I hope she won’t mind me sharing – lost her husband. He left all of the sudden for another woman. She was devastated; this man was everything to her. (And yes, I still say he had every right to leave, but…) My friend, who I know to be a strong, amazing woman, went into a deep depression. She was in such a deep state of terrorizing sadness and a state of loss and confusion that any weaker person would have killed themselves, and she, too, wasn’t far from it. She went online and asked people what the easiest way to die is, and she decided on the method of her own suicide, and she told me all of this, knowing I would let her go through her process. And I knew that if she killed herself, it would be because she KNEW nothing else would work.

She had better days and worse days, just like everyone else, but eventually, out of the blue, another friend of hers invited her to a secret elite sex club. She went. Her depression was completely gone in two weeks after that.

Covid put an end to the club, but her depression didn’t return. Instead, she fell in love again. Out of the blue, during a stay-at-home fitness class.

And I know, now she looks back at the dark days and shakes her head: “What drama over nothing!”

The moral of the story; she looked at it, she dealt with it, and eventually, life intervened.

And, never ever underestimate the power of sex.

Another friend of mine, a seemingly average CIS-gendered straight man, was in an unhappy marriage that made him very morose and depressed…

He started feeling curious about other men and downloaded Grinder, which got him through the worst of it all until he got divorced and beyond. He loves those men for being there after living his whole life as a heterosexual.

As I told my friend in the first example, if you’re ready to die now, you’re also ready for some risks in life. If you’re going to kill yourself, rather try to have some fun while getting yourself killed.

Subscribe to get a Daily Message