Rituals of release
The importance of giving feelings some place to go
Did you know bagpipes make me cry? If yes, I wish you would have told me because I had no idea until last Saturday. It’s messed up that you said nothing; I could have prepared.
Anne was one of those special family friends who became simply family. To be in a family is special. To be chosen is reserved for the best of us.
When my parents had their first baby, it was Anne who was chosen to be the first person they’d leave her with. As the story goes, my mom leaned over her crib and whispered, “Now you be good for Auntie Anne.” I never knew her as anything else.
She was an actress in stage plays, which always meant she’d visit and perform these ridiculous characters. They always had accents. Deep accents. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to tell a 70-year-old woman, who is full of love, that she’s not allowed to do certain accents anymore because they’re no longer politically correct, and she responds in the accent.
Alzheimer’s disease is anything but kind. Saying goodbye was difficult, but so were the last few years of her life. The funeral was tough, but then that’s sort of their whole thing.
Emerging from the building, I felt something common that tends to happen after such an experience: a sense of relief. The weight of not wanting to go to a funeral tends to give way to some manner of relaxation in an emotional muscle you didn’t realize was tight.
Funerals are an uncomfortable ritual, but a ritual all the same.
Internal storage
Humans have an enviable amount of internal storage. Most animals by contrast don’t appear to hold a lot. Last I checked, squirrels don’t seem too bothered by the prime rate on their homeowners line of credit. Raccoons barely ever worry about the strength of the Euro. Do chickadees ever wish for more?
Meanwhile, I can tell you the colour of blouse my grade 3 teacher was wearing when I first had my name put on the board. Getting your name on the board was treated as a light warning for acting out, which 9-year-old me took as DEFCON 1. I wasn’t much of a get-your-name-on-the-board kind of kid.
It wasn’t even my fault, Greg asked me a question and I was answering it. IT WASN’T A SOCIAL CONVERSATION. I WAS HELPING. I CAN’T PLEASE YOU ALL. I WILL CONTINUE TO TRY THOUGH.
Anyways, I didn’t get a stamp in my notebook that day because if you got your name on the board you didn’t get a stamp, which means my grade 3 notebook has a stamp on every single day, save for one in October. I know it was October because it was a sweet witch silhouette. Halloween-themed, no doubt. Fuck almighty I can’t believe I missed a seasonal stamp.
Anyways, I’m doing great and don’t have any problems whatsoever.
What I’m saying is all things have weight. Some we let go. Some we do not.
Monks and babies
Babies exist as fleshy potatoes of inspiration when it comes to managing this weight. They haven’t learned that love is conditional on grades and beauty yet, so they tend to emote with relative freedom.
They’ll burp-vomit milk onto you then scream in your face for not cleaning it up fast enough. Within moments they’re laughing and chewing on their own foot. If you can look past how disgusting it all is, it’s almost impressive. I wish I could chew my foot.
Monks are similar. Not so much in the milk category (thank god), but in the emotional expression. Contrary to popular belief, monks aren’t emotionally flat.
They cry, become furious, and laugh with their entire body. What’s different is they process through those emotions relatively quickly. While the popular image of monks is them meditating under a waterfall or enduring insane levels of pain, they actually feel more, not less.
In a study of pain management, weird, sadistic researchers found when they applied a very hot piece of metal to the skin of participants, the monks involved actually rated the pain level to be higher than non-monks.
The difference? They returned to normal faster than the non-monks, who continued to suffer the event long after it was over.
The monks found their own foot to chew on.
Rituals of expression
Humans evolved in small tribes where the important feelings had somewhere to go. Grief was given a funeral to say goodbye, anger was given a confrontation to express boundaries, and jubilation was given a dance to share the win. The rituals of storytelling, rhythm, and song were our ways of metabolizing experience.
When there’s no container for our feelings, where do they go? Do they go anywhere at all? Do we become the container?
As we retreat within ourselves and abandon human connection at the altar of more, do we lose the opportunities to process through the complexities of this never-ending shit show?
There’s no point
In conversation with a friend recently, I asked how their music was going.
“Oh, I gave up,” they said, “with AI these days, people are pumping out trash so often it’s even harder to get noticed, so there’s no point.”
Music wasn’t even this person’s primary source of income. I’m unsure if it was a source of any income whatsoever. It was–I thought–a personal thing they did for fun.
Is the purpose of a personal hobby to be discovered, become famous, and make tons of money? That would certainly be nice (subscribe below, I beg of you), but is it the purpose? What of the value of creative expression for the creator and nobody else? Can we not celebrate that as essential?
The error message
Perhaps anxiety, depression, and illness is the error message that says, “you’re holding onto too much and we’re running out of storage.”
If this were a problem of information, none of us would have issues. We have more information and unimpeded access to it than any human in history.
We know holding too much is bad, we know boundaries are important, and we know expression is healthy. And yet, we remain inundated with ignored error messages.
Of course. Rituals are the answer.
No. God, stop doing that. This stuff is complicated. But there’s probably something there.
We need to feel, goddammit. You can go through the most devastating breakup of your life, walk into a grocery store, buy almond milk, and nobody even knows half of you is missing. That’s not great.
The upper success rate of almost all known mental health interventions is about 50%. Fitness? 50%. Meditation? 50%. Pills? 50%. Wanna know what stands curiously alone as the king? Dancing. Not by much, but the answer is dancing.
This is not me raging against the pharmaceutical industry by asking you to moonwalk your Klonopin to the bin. That said though, when dancing routinely works as well as Prozac, there’s a discussion to be had about the loss and importance of human expression.
So write a sad poem, listen to an angry song, do some yoga or cry on a hike. For Christ's sake though, stop insulting these things by calling them hobbies (or worse, side-hustles).
They’re experiences that allow you to put your feelings somewhere else and clear yourself. They’re funerals for the things we don’t want to feel. Sometimes uncomfortable to go to, but you’re lighter after.
And so we reach the end of this one. This is where I’m supposed to find a clever callback. What should we use? The witch stamp, my first interrupted ritual that clearly haunts me to this day? Maybe I pull some heartstrings and bring Auntie Anne out for her encore.
I’m suddenly struck that of all the characters she played, there’s only one I recognized as a kid. She’d cackle whenever she saw me, calling me her “pretty.”
For a short time in an Edmonton theatre, she played the Wicked Witch of the West.
For the life of me (and I’ve been trying for twenty minutes), I can’t figure out how to tie that all together neatly.
But it seems like a good place to leave things.