Punching bag

By Erin Deborah Waks

When I got home from work last night, I felt rising sadness. Desperate for it to stop, I cooked myself a nice dinner, poured a glass of Pinot and sat down to watch a Disney film. But then my flatmate went to bed and I was left alone with an aching feeling, a fear, an anxiety that felt almost uncontrollable, and so I called my partner. My mind was full of all the difficult moments of my day, as well as everything he had done that had ‘made’ me so sad.

I am not, despite what I think, great at sitting with discomfort. It’s almost as though I am forcing myself to think the worst - I feel nauseous, therefore I must have the worst stomach bug ever. A friend ignored my text, therefore they hate me. And I must do something to fix it.

Call the friend. Take medication. Rant and cry it away. Have a glass of wine. Have two glasses of wine. Make it go away, and go away fast. 

I hung up the phone last night and sobbed. The kind of ugly crying that is only accompanied by sad country music, a pile of blankets and a good old glass of Pinot. Bridget Jones-style crying.

Coming back from a feeling like that is seldom easy. Picking up the pieces of your own meltdown is humbling, taking responsibility for your own emotions is tough. Worrying you’ve lost someone because of it is a difficult anxiety to appease. 

What I also felt, though, was the heaviness of a realisation: outsourcing one’s happiness is far too much pressure on another person. Without even being aware of it, I hoped that all of those things you see in movies would be true, that I’d be ‘saved.’ But how can someone ever feel like they’re enough when they’re being made to hold the weight of someone they love who refuses to save themselves? How can one feel truly accepted if given an impossible task, at which they’re doomed to fail?

When you hit a punching bag, work out hard at the gym, write furious poetry, you mark a blank canvas with all the hurt inside you, expelling the rage out of your system and with that achieving a sense of catharsis. That’s the feeling I needed, the thing I was chasing. To let go of the sadness, or feel it and let it pass.

I don’t regret my meltdown. To be a person is to have messy feelings, to feel insecure, to have doubts and not know things for sure, and I’ve spent too many years beating myself up for that. 

But a person isn’t a punching bag. And hitting my person felt far from cathartic.