One of the hardest things for me to contend with is allowing myself to feel my feelings.

Before accupuncture I was doing a wonderful job of not even realizing what I was feeling. I learned to shut myself completely off from feeling any emotions.

As a thirteen-year-old I was quick to feel things. I was even voted most emotional in my eighth grade class. I love telling people who have only met grown up Janika about that. They look at me like I have sprouted a monstrous face wart.

At thirteen I was giving away love and hugs freely. Now a days I can know you for a decade and I am still not opening up to hug you when I see you. Since thirteen a lot of disappointing shit has happened to me, and without the slightest awareness of what I was doing, I began to shut myself away from the world.

Whenever something sad happens to me I can think of a hundred things that could be sadder. Even when my heart is broken I can still see how much more broken it could be.

I am grateful that the things that I go through are as trivial as people I  never thought in a million years would let me down have surprised me.

I could have real problems. My babies could be sick, my husband could be dying, I could be a Syrian refugee for Christ sake.

I have a problem allowing myself to feel my emotions because I don’t think my problems merit the emotions attached to them. I have convinced myself that I do not deserve to feel sad over things that do not meet my standards of tragic. I feel guilty. Like I am bitching about nothing.

I feel weak, which is something I hate to feel, because I have built my brand on being a hero, and heroes do not complain. I feel like allowing myself to feel bad means I am somehow defeated, and there is no way I am being defeated by small nuisances.

I am stuck in this strange place of learning to  be ok with feeling bad.

Letting the heart ache, stress or aggravation funnel through me, all the while being grateful that these are my only problems.

I am trying to learn to feel again. Lately I am quick to cry over everything, which is a very vintage Janika characteristic.

I am learning that you can be sad and grateful at the same time.