Honestly I just cried a lot today
Submitted by Moonside in yourpersonalblog (edited )
Honestly I just wanted the occasion shout into the void, but I feel like I made a little self-insight progress today. That sort of intuition isn't often that valuable source on these matters, but maybe writing process can help.
Today I went for a walk, listening to The Adventure Zone but I was bawling out over old shit behind the sunglasses. Mentor figures who were helpful, friends I haven't seen in a while or kept up with or past romances and crushes that went sour or nowhere because of immaturity or happenstance. Also things I never got to experience because of being too soft on personal boundaries. Regrets, lost things, that sort of thing. I'm in a depressive episode which when I'm hyperempathetic and cry at everything, like animal vids or fiction that just isn't plain good and would annoy me in any other mood.
I've been dealing with cyclothymia for one and a half decades now. Each year, I have two or three episodes of depressive mood which alternate with normal and hypomanic ones. I also deal with sensory oversensitivity, but those issues I can pretty well deal with well just by asking people politely to tone it down and just keeping my apartment the way I like it. Honestly the biggest single concrete difficulty has been sleep. Otherwise I have a tendency towards irrational thinking during depressive episodes, but I haven't had delusions.
But now I wonder if I actually have some issues with repressing emotions. I'm not the type of person to repress anger, sadness or avoid anxiety so I thought I'd be in the clear. But now I feel like it's just some other emotions that I've repressed, like shame and even pride and gratitude, which can be a bit difficult to express in Finnish culture. (People feel awkward about receiving them which makes giving them a minor mine field.) Some of the things that I keep coming back to seem to be about repressed positive emotions.
P.S Brief googling indicates that repression is supposedly a grand daddy of defence mechanisms, so others derive from it.