As someone with bipolar, I'm going to heartily argue that yes, sometimes emotions manifest for no apparent reason. Sure, it might be helpful to identify what triggers bouts of anxiety or anger or depression, but delving deep into the past and obsessing about the childhood incident when your mom swatted you for something your little sister did probably isn't actually going to help overcome that emotion. Sometimes the best you can do is just ride it out and try to get through it.
Sometimes you're just anxious and worrying about it won't
do anything for you but make you worry.
I've said before that emotions aren't such rational beasts, and it's true. What is mildly frustrating to me one day might trigger a massive emotional breakdown another day. Most of the time seeing that my email is full of junk emails merits only a brief rolling of the eyes, but some days it makes me feel lonely and depressed. (That link is to a previous post in this blog, by the way.) I can't predict the future any better than anyone else, so I don't know what might set me off from one day to the next. I do know that obsessing over the past or a negative emotion is not healthy.
A few weeks ago, I bailed out on an event I had been looking forward to all week at the last minute. I was feeling stressed out and anxious and was getting pressured to hurry up and get ready, and finally when I was asked "Do you just want us to go without you?" I answered, "Kind of, yeah." It turned out that the event was actually pretty lame, and 'food trucks' turned out to be 'hot dog stands.' Now, I didn't realize this when I decided not to attend, but I do know that if I had been rushed and pressured to hurry up and go to find that it was a disappointment, it would've made me feel much worse.
You call that a food truck?
My mother, meaning well, asked me the next day why I had been feeling so stressed and anxious that I skipped out on our plans at the last minute. I had a few reasons to feel stressed, but not necessarily anything too major. Ultimately I ended up telling her that I had been stressed out because I have a mental illness, and sometimes I get stressed for barely any reason at all. The why of it really didn't matter, because the reasons weren't what I had to deal with; the emotion was what I had to deal with.
It's not fun to feel bad. I've been accused of wallowing in my misery by people who have no idea what depression actually is, and surprisingly, it did not help. I've had people ask me why I'd feel a certain way because it just made no sense. I've had people berate me for having trouble accepting things, and demand to know why I couldn't just 'let it go.' Well, the answer to that is that this is not a musical and I don't have magical ice powers and the catchiest Disney song since The Lion King.
Lucky you. The rest of the town needs blankets in spring now.
So my question is why would you put yourself through that? Why would you stick your worst emotions under a microscope and try to figure out where the root was and go digging around it when it will wither up and die given time? If you always feel a certain way after a certain stimulus, it's worth investigating, but having a sad or anxious or angry day isn't going to be solved by trying to figure out where and why and how it came to be.
If it helps you to analyze every one of your emotions to death, then by all means, don't let me stop you. But if, like me, you have gotten no help from trying to do that, if you've only found it makes that emotion consume you, maybe it's time to stop and say, "Who cares why I feel this way? I feel it, and I'm the one who has to live with it, so I'm going to live with it." And maybe you can also sing the song from Frozen, if that helps.
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