I am on the train back to London from Worcester and I am, in the words of Drake, “in my feelings”. I have spent the past 48 hours at home with my family, saying goodbye before I move to Athens for a year to study for a master’s degree. (Reader, don’t rejoice, you haven’t seen the back of me yet—I’ll still be writing this column from the cradle of democracy.) As the train chugs through the rolling Worcestershire hills on a painfully beautiful Sunday early-afternoon, I am reflecting on change and the complicated jumble of positive and negative emotions it triggers.
I am, even at the best of times, an emotionally incontinent person—I am so thin-skinned that I sometimes feel as though I’m moving through the world without the necessary protective gear, the feelings of others bleeding into my own and my own feelings leaking out into the world. I am often left bruised by everyday interactions: if the man I buy coffee from on my daily commute gives me a slightly less enthusiastic “good morning”, I spiral into self-doubt. By the same token, I am launched into paroxysms of joy at the sight of a particularly fluffy dog padding across the common.
I am thus very used to living on an emotional rollercoaster—but I was unprepared to board the runaway ghost train that arrived for me in my last few weeks on British soil. Everything is everywhere all at once: excitement morphs into sadness morphs into joy morphs into fear morphs into pre-emptive homesickness morphs into lethargy morphs back into joy. When people ask me how I am, I simply don’t know how to answer them: at any given moment, I am straining under the weight of several contradictory emotions. And then I feel narcissistic and self-obsessed for spending so much time thinking about how I feel.
But as Arthur Brooks writes in “How to build a life”, his clear-headed psychology column in the Atlantic, perhaps I don’t need to give myself such a hard time for struggling with mixed feelings about moving abroad. “Mixed emotions drain your emotional batteries, like a phone connecting to multiple networks simultaneously,” he says. He points to a study that found that experiencing mixed emotions is even worse for people’s wellbeing than experiencing negative emotions alone. I can see why—there is something particularly dizzying about veering between extremes. I am so excited to move to a place where crystal-clear waters and whitewashed chapels are less than an hour away on public transport. But I am also wallowing in the painful nostalgia that comes with spending a weekend watching Netflix with my sister and marching through the English countryside with my dad.
I am used to living on an emotional rollercoaster—but I was unprepared to board a runaway ghost train
When I get back to my flat, I sit at my desk and draw up my trusty “Sanity First” plan, which I implement whenever I feel myself slipping back into old habits, ruminating and crying all the time. The plan includes some good old-fashioned discipline: Eat some fruit, I write, go for a run. But some of it is a bit more off the wall: Spend five minutes doing musical thoughts. (Musical thoughts is a mindfulness activity by which I play my anxious thoughts to the sound of my favourite tune in my head—my current favourite is Charli XCX’s “360”). Do 10 minutes of watercolour painting.(For some reason painting relaxes me like nothing else.)
All of these activities are aimed at getting me out of my feelings and into the world. Because while a perfectly packed suitcase is important, the next best thing I could bring to Athens is a sound mind.
