Emotional Hangovers
Have you ever loved someone so much that when you get into a weird emotional event (a fight, a weird text exchange, an inopportune sideways glance, someone’s caught gossiping, a perceived judgment, or your sister caught you hiding that necklace you borrowed but kept long enough for her to forget and then hoped she’d never visit your bedroom because who does that when you’re 40ish?!) it took a few days to feel right? It lingers for a day more and you keep playing with the details in your mind? It took me most of my life to figure out that the reason I didn’t want to make the check-in phone call was the thought, “what if they stopped loving me???”
I think that’s the price we have to pay to go in deep with someone. We have to risk them not loving us anymore when something goes sideways. The heart-pounding, hands-shaking, nervous phone call to ask, “are we ok?”, is the price we pay to let them know we care enough to ask.
Let’s be honest though, are they really going to stop loving us? Probably not. When we live in our heads we get the answer we think we know. If we play the scenario out with someone else we’ll get new insight into a different way of thinking. They might ask us a question about the situation that will spark hope or dread, and it will move us forward.
If we don’t have a trusted sounding board, journaling can help. Reading it a few days later will help us see our thinking in a different light. I just found something I’d written 6 years ago and I laughed out loud. Every day we grow and learn and become a tiny bit different version of ourselves.
What Covid-19 has taught us is that communication is crucial to keeping connections. We’re all getting a little weird. We read texts through the lens of that weirdness. We don’t get body language. We don’t get the humor in the same way. We think too much about how long it takes to hear back. It makes that damn hangover last so much longer.
What I know is that every time you make the phone call it gets a little easier. Your relationships will grow stronger. You build more trust. The hangover is so much shorter.
