Writer: Monica Lin

Editors: Ashley Yeung and Alloe Mak

As humans, it is natural for us to be scared of vulnerability, especially when it comes to negative emotions. In order to express feelings that are deep and soulful, we have to be vulnerable—to dig them up from the depths within us and present them like newly debuted artworks. For certain feelings, it’s easier than others; happiness seeps through our cracks and pores when we beam like orbs of sunshine. Everyone feels the light we bring through our smiles or laughter. It’s a precious sensation that we offer to the world; cupping the feeling and opening it to float to the wind; a mother letting their child go to school for the first time. However, for negative emotions, we hide them away, forbidding society to see us in a state where we are vulnerable—a state where we desperately need comfort and human interaction. We pretend as if we cannot see or sense them; the feelings aren’t there. They’re hidden and kept cleanly away—seen as burdens instead of a part of us. 

This act of hiding is embedded in our natural lives. Do you wear your sadness like a newly bought sweater or do you wear it like an undergarment, despite it feeling like the core of you at that moment? What about your anger? Do you show it on the public commute home, or conceal it with a politely poised expression? Your rawness, the emotions that create the “you” at the moment, are they there on your face or words? Or, are they hidden away through excuses and silence? 

Perhaps we think that our negative emotions—because they create such a strong and unwavering complexity—must be hidden away to provide a sense of protection. The trust you must have to start crying in front of someone is like the trust you must have in someone to hold your bike as you take off your training wheels. In the same way that it takes patience and understanding to peel an onion to its inner bits and pieces, we only show our emotions to people who we trust; our hearts are buried under our ribcages, protecting what is near and dear. Or, perhaps, it’s social media influencing us to make us believe that our lives need to be picture-perfect—full of sparkles and aesthetic sunsets—forcing our negative emotions into jars that don’t fit quite right. The media we consume, in return, consumes us, altering our minds to make us believe that life is good. If yours is not, there must be something wrong with your code. For one reason or another, we hide all of our bad bits under clothing and masks, presenting only the clean and good parts for society’s scornful eyes. 

What we don’t notice is how life slips through our hands, how jar lids seem to open themselves, and how we find ourselves drowning in a sea of something we thought we had “coped” with. Emotions become a forgotten part of our lives, despite them being a crucial aspect of living. 

 When I was younger, I did not have the best control over my emotions. It was one of those quirks about me; calm and quiet at school, but a volcano at home. My father always asked me “Why so much emotion?” in rough English whenever I got into one of my flurries of feelings. This downplayed the extent of my emotions; they were insignificant because it was just me having another temper tantrum. Thus, when I once found myself crying, tearing my heart apart while peeling carrots, my dad was furious—ranting about how “this wasn’t the time” and I should “get over it.” The vibrant, yet hazy memory of that day still sticks with me like honey in a jar. It was during the height of rush hour in my family-run restaurant. I still remember the repetitive beep of the printer and the routinely ring of the phone, people bustling back and forth to pass up orders, and numbers being called in Mandarin and English while the loud rumbling of the fans powered on and on. The grease on my clothes, fingers, and hair made me feel perpetually stuffed and icky as if I was in one big oil barrel. I do not know what caused the tears, or why I was hidden in the back in the first place. Typically, I am right beside my mother, packing orders with rehearsed efficiency and practice. There would be no reason to be crying and spilling useless tears over carrots. As I stared down through the ache in my throat and watery eyes, I could see my hands stained orange, gripping the vegetables for dear life. 

My jars were opening, one by one, drowning me over, and over, and over again. 

I remember my father telling me to suck it up as he brushed past me to reach the walk-in refrigerator for a bin of celery. There was no use of big emotions, he said, as mushrooms were furiously chopped. He told me to go and clean myself up and to get it over with. I didn’t look up from my task—scared of his eyes which I knew were boring into my skull. The peeler slid up and caught itself in one of the many groves of the carrot. I tried my best to continue the peeling as if nothing was happening and there were no tears on my face. The carrot peels were sticking to my hands; the orange slices and rough skin did not mix well. 

I remember crying hard, to the point where my hands shook, causing indents on the carrot that I was gripping too strongly. At some point, my sister came and held me while I gave up on peeling and sobbed. There was a lot of screaming that I couldn’t piece together. Someone was asking me what was wrong, and through all of the messiness, I couldn’t tell. There wasn’t something wrong, just that the whole world seemed to suddenly kick me out of its orbit. I was feeling too much in such little time and did not know how to show it except by crying my small heart out on the rice bags laid in a corner of the room. 

I now know that such bubbling of feelings tipping over the edge comes from keeping it all inside. Younger me dealt with it all the time, typically at the restaurant where stressful and high-paced situations forced the pressure to increase, causing the jar lids to pop right off. Which begs the question: why do we bottle up our emotions at all? It would be so much easier if I unscrewed the jar myself and gently poured it down the sink. Why do we shelve them? Are they attractive to keep and look at? Their glimmer, the slight sparkles when the sun hits them in the right way, are they pretty in the same way smoking is aesthetic? It hurts, doesn’t it, to breathe in something that is killing us? So, why do we do it? Why is there so much pain that goes untold and is left for glass and plastic lids to dissect? 

Emotions make us human; I wholeheartedly believe that. To bottle all your emotions up is to let a pot of water boil and only notice that something is wrong when the fire alarm goes off. Why don’t you turn off the heat and sponge up the spilled water? Perhaps because it is too warm—too hot and scalding for you at that moment. But, once the moment passed and the water has cooled, why don’t we clean it up? Why does it feel like we would all rather feign oblivion to the emotions that tear us apart? 

During our teenage years, especially with the pandemic screwing up time, all our moments slipped away too quickly—falling like sand between our fingers. It was just the beginning of high school a couple of months ago, and suddenly, you are asked to phase into the next motion of life. Where did all of it go? You feel as if you have matured, yet stayed the same. As if your younger self is existing in a shell of someone you recognize, but barely. 

It is the lack of processing of what happened in the past that creates the feeling of everything moving too fast. 

I want us to find that moment in between all the crying and smiling to let ourselves pause and exist. I want us to hold ourselves tight, take our jars off the shelves, and sift through the rocks and muck settled at the bottom—taking our time learning about who we used to be and how we changed. The world is massive and things are only going to pick up speed as we zoom past all of the little and large moments without acknowledging how we feel during such times. 

 Slowing down our time to focus on keeping ourselves good causes life to be meaningful and to have value.

We need to feel. Quality of life is slowly leaving our generation and we are forgetting what it feels like to have the wind rip through our hair while driving on the freeway past 2 am. There is a constant lack of understanding of what we are and where we belong, and leaving jars kept screwed tight is only going to leave us murky and blind. These jars are not aesthetic, nor the societal norm. They are ticking bombs, ready to throw us completely off-course the second we leave ourselves vulnerable. 

When I say let yourself feel, I’m not only talking about the happy moments. The turbulence, the thunderstorms, and all the messy parts need to be felt within as well. Let your anger burn and fill all your crevices before washing it all out. We need to feel our heart smile, cry, laugh, and wilt, to understand what feeling is—to understand that it is but the essence of life. 

These traumas, moments, and experiences, good or bad, are the things which build you like Lego stacking up one by one. To deprive yourself of fully experiencing your moments is to stunt your growth. Be gentle with yourself—do not hate your soul for feeling out of place or for feeling abnormal. Let yourself feel these strange things you may not understand and hold them close, searching for their roots and threads. Untangle them, process them, scream them out to your best friend, write them out on pages with ink, and befriend them, the same way you would befriend an elephant. Do not simply “cope”; allow your emotions to co-exist beside you. They are not a companion you meet on our journey throughout life, they are us; they make our souls glow. They are what we are and hiding them away is leaving half of you unfull.

Take your time, but one day, unscrew your jars and let yourself live.