Emotional health is more than just a smiley emoji

I woke up feeling melancholy. I’ve moved to a new home, and every morning I listen to the birds as they compete with the distant traffic noise. The trees are big and wonderful, and dropping leaves faster than Tyla’s dropping hit singles. Tranquillity and freneticism compete, and it takes a conscious effort to ignore the social media feed on my phone and sip my coffee instead.

A friend is battling a mental breakdown, and access to the public health system is a complex navigation. I am sad to see the worry in the eyes of family members who care deeply for their relative, but are exhausted and worn out by the persistent threat of harm that may befall them. The system, as it stands, is not geared towards care and compassion, and it’s the special people who work within it that remain the carriers of hope that it may change.

Someone else in my life is starting anew in a new city, seeking a fresh beginning that will help heal their heart. They are leaving family and friends, and the emotions border on disbelief that the move is happening, sadness that daily visits won’t happen for a time, but happiness that healing can begin.

And then there’s the pain of distance and silence. No words exchanged, no phone calls or texts - some call it ghosting. But who knew that there was so much more to the saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It’s a lot more complicated than mere fondness, and it definitely isn’t a guarantee that the affection increases.

My brother from out of town and his family brought such joy to our weekend by just being with us. Of course, it helps that his grandson is the cutest little guy you’ll meet, especially when he’s putting on his best hadeda impersonation. There are no words that capture the complete joy of a grandparent who successfully lulls their year-old grandchild to sleep.

Life throws so many emotions at us. There is the struggle to survive in a difficult world that places so much value on material things, but that makes it damn hard to get a job to buy them. There is the trauma of apartheid for many of us older types that hasn’t been resolved, and it manifests in so much violence and dysfunction in family and social relations in our country. It impacts our children, too, in such different ways. Where do young people find meaning and purpose when their parents’ generation fought one of the most noble struggles in recent history? I have had conversations where they feel like they’re messing around as they navigate their existential challenges, and yet there are so many things in today’s world that conspire with ill intent to break the spirit and well-being of young people. 

It wasn’t just this morning’s melancholy that got me started on this track. It was prompted by random reflections on the emojis on Facebook and how modern tools of communication provide such shallow responses to situations. We have reduced our emotional reactions to smiley face emoticons or shiny pulsating heart images, and I think we are in danger of adopting - or have already adopted - the shallowness of these expressions in how we relate to different life situations. We click the little sad face at images of the Israeli genocide, or angry ones at the orange nonsense across the Atlantic. We give a thumbs up to posts that are witty or challenging or radical-sounding or disruptive. There’s a ‘care’ one that hugs a heart – I guess best used when you want to share the pain or struggle of a friend. And how many of us use the laughing emoji as a response to a post, even though we haven’t even cracked a smile. 

We have to concentrate on not letting the system of social media, incessant bad news reports, daily survival struggles, and past and present traumas flatten out our capacity to feel, to have emotions. We cannot reduce fundamental human interactions to emoticons and shallow platitudes. We need to embrace our feelings and emotions in all their messiness. I have no idea why I am feeling melancholy this morning, and that’s fine. I have embraced it, and maybe by the time I finish this piece and reach the end of the day, I will have figured it out, or shared it with a friend who might help me figure it out, or perhaps I will not have found the cause and tomorrow the blues may return. We have to feel. We have to care. We have to muddle through our uncertainties and pain, and not try to fit our feelings into neat boxes so that we appear okay and sorted. It’s in the messiness that the connections our world so needs are more likely to be made.