7 Comments

Thank you. You articulated for me. This is your skill and job, to make things inchoate, able to be expressed. Still, I love how you do it. It’s roomy, and allows others in.

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Get out of my brain, Ashley C Ford.

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Oh man. Engaging with the IDEA of your emotions instead of engaging with your emotions... that’s exactly it. Thanks for voicing this, Ashley. Wishing you the best as you wait out the tide.

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This. I have felt this way for two years. Stuck inside a 1br apartment in a neighborhood of sad, comfortable (or worse, Nazi) people, with a partner who basically talks for a living. The inability to just have space - physical, psychological - to emote on top of the very real anger I have about not feeling allowed to emote for other reasons (hi, childhood / womanhood) has reached a boiling point. I needed to read this. Going to banish my partner to his actual workplace and express some anger and sadness and sit with feeling absolutely dead inside by myself in my apartment ASAP. Thanks for writing and sharing this 🙏🏼

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I related to this HARD. I've done the same things - been so overwhelmed with anger I rip up books, scream, hit pillows - and after the adrenaline wears off I feel like amonster I need to hide from. Thank you for sharing; I feel less alone in my struggle. <3

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You know what I thought of as I read this. That it seems so violent and monsterous to express my own anger and rage, but it probably isn’t as bad as I think. Because when I read about you screaming and throwing things I didn’t think woah that’s extreme. I just thought that’s a perfectly fine expression of anger. So maybe if I expressed my anger fully like that it wouldn’t seem as extreme as it is in my head.

It’s interesting how I have such different standards for myself vs other people. It doesn’t make any sense yet it’s there regardless. I guess that’s trauma for you. Uug. I’m pissed off at that too. That trauma traps me in irrational thought. That it makes me afraid of myself and that I don’t deserve ALL parts of me to be accepted and allowed to exist up front. Welp. Here’s to letting out the parts we hold inside more and more so we can prove to ourselves they aren’t a threat and deserve to be expressed.

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I don't want to take away from the so much of you that it is in this but all I could think of was Mr. Rogers and him guiding this all. Thank you, once again, with sharing so much of you with us so we can all feel a bit more whole.

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