Negative Feelings are Helpful

TwistyHeadedMan is staying in my spare room at the moment, he is extremely helpful when I am lost in my creative funk, which both last year and this became oppressive in June/July. I guess I have a touch of seasonally affective disorder, since I seem to become unpleasantly obsessed with work during the summer, when I really should be out in the gardens.

Last night, I got him to take a look at my post on Wolfe.  ‘Grumpy but positive’ I said, is that OK?

‘That’s how you always are.’ he said.  I really am turning into my father.

It is often very difficult to find a positive spin to put on an extended period of unadulterated misery, especially when it involved binning two years of hard work, but I have found over the years that it is sometimes wise to be floored by the punches rather than rolling with them.  Were I to publish my classical academic work as Ina, I would at least get a few people to read it now, as opposed to sweating blood over an ignored epic under my own equally ridiculous name. World events since 2011 have proved that the academic book is not only necessary, but essential whether the object of my devotional work likes it or not. (see other posts)

I could look on it, rather angrily as four wasted years that could have been easily avoided, but it is no big deal.  I am well used to being underestimated.  Ten years ago I was involved in a corporate scandal.  The company involved simply could not believe that one scruffy woman would have the audacity to call them out.  Since then I have lived an extremely quiet life, but I learned a lot.

Back in the days of my feverish research into the raw food movement, I used to become irritated at the insistence on positivity circulated by the more popular speakers.  Positivity is all very well if you do not require your brain to be engaged on critical pursuits, but it is as useful as a chocolate teapot when you need to be more strategic or analytic.  It is almost used as a weapon – J P Sears has a rather good video on New Age spiritualism which concurs with this view. Please allow me to let you in on an apparent secret – no feelings are truly unnecessary:

1. Grief is fine, and if you ignore it it comes back and bites you in the ass.  It lasts as long as you decide it needs to.

2. Jealousy is a mammalian construct, any owner of multiple dogs or cats will tell you it is not exclusive to humans and is inbuilt for survival.  Whilst it is not much fun experiencing it, and I personally have chosen to reject it as useless, it is not unnatural to protect yourself from pain.

3. Sadness, often misdiagnosed as depression, is entirely natural.  Depression needs to be clarified by definition as irrational sadness, often physical in nature, and can be alleviated first by dietary means, and then by simply giving yourself the time to pinpoint your repressed anger.

4. Anger is fine.  It is much better to allow some flash fury than pretend to maintain your cool and become depressed later.

And so on.  My work as Ina depends on the ego, particularly the wounded ego.  If I was to pretend that everything was fine, Ina would not exist and no work would get done at all.  All feelings are fine, all feelings are productive.   Nothing in your life should be wasted.