Hey, everyone! I got very inspired by some of the Inktober prompts going on this month, and I decided to try and write for as many as time allows. I started pretty late into the game with day 10’s prompt, but better late than never, right? Either way, I hope you enjoy my start into this journey!
I sometimes think feelings are bigger than we give them credit for. They can be so big that they spill to into the world and spread to those around us, and they can be so big that it fills the senses, and changes the lens in which we see life. Feelings are bigger than this country, this world, and maybe even the vast expanses of this galaxy. We have no way of measuring how big a feeling is, maybe because feelings themselves are too big to measure. We may just cry if we get too sad, or too happy, or too angry, but we can’t possibly know how big that feeling is.
Feelings are sometimes so big, that we only see the feeling itself, and not the intricacies within it. You see a girl crying and you feel that she’s sad, but do you see that she’s crying because she lost her job, her mom, and her spouse all in the same 6-month span of time? You see a small child jumping for joy about his mom buying him a new video game, but do you see him jumping for joy because it was the first game she could afford for him in the ten years that he’s been around?
Feelings are gigantic, in ways that are either full or overwhelming. Sometimes we want to feel so much of a feeling that it leaves room for nothing else, but sometimes we forget that too much of a feeling forces out the kind of feelings we need to protect ourselves. Maybe feeling one feeling entirely is too much for our bodies to contain, and that’s why the general sense of feelings are so easy to see in others.
It’s hard to know if I’ve even felt one feeling so strongly, that I’ve moved all feelings aside. I know I’ve felt so sad that I’ve cried, felt so happy that I giggled, and felt so angry that I tensed up, but has that feeling itself ever been so big that it’s actually taken over? Has it ever become so big that it spilled out of me and soaked into someone else? Has it ever been so big that surrounded me, and disguised me as the feeling itself?
How can a thing be so minuscule, but so gigantic all at the same time? Sometimes we can hold ourselves back from expressing it, and sometimes it’s bigger than anything we’ve ever seen, leaving us with no choice but to let them overflow. Sometimes it’s harder to contain than it is to express it, and holding the feelings back is how the dam can burst. If that’s the case, some of us must be so eager to something break.
And maybe that’s why feelings are so big; we’re supposed to see them, feel them, and be aware of how big their existence truly is. They must be so big so that we can’t miss them. They’re gigantic because they’re omnipresent, and no matter how much we try to ignore that, they’ll never be contained. Feelings can seem small, and they can feel like too much to handle, but they can never be forced to be smaller than they are. They know their own potential, and have no fear about how much of that potential they will show. That’s what makes a feeling so big, so gigantic, that we may never have a grasp on what it truly means to feel.