Emotions are human. Sometimes, emotions are fun, right? When I’m spending my time with friends or doing something I love, I want to feel those emotions. I want to feel the joy, the happiness, and the love. But other times, I wish I could plunge my hand into my chest and rip my heart right out, and then throw it away. Sometimes, emotions are the very last thing I want to feel. 

After a bad grade, disappointment sits in my stomach like a rock. When I fight with my parents, the anger boils inside my throat until I feel like I might throw it all up. After someone does something awful to me at school, the sadness is a pit I can’t climb out of. These negative emotions overcome me at times, and all I want is for them to get out of my body. So, in turn, I take those emotions and try to throw them onto someone else. I try to rid myself of these feelings, so I make others feel the same way in hopes that it will make me feel better. 

It never does.

When I got my heart broken, I went right back out and made someone else feel the same way. No matter how undeserving the person was, at least they felt as crappy as I did. If I’m angry over a bad grade at school, I’ll yell at my mom in the car when all she is trying to do is make innocent conversation. (All she asked was how my day went.) When I feel insecure about something, my first instinct is to turn around and make the next person feel those insecurities, just like I do. When I feel all these negative emotions, I try to make others feel the same way no matter how innocent they are. Sometimes I find myself being the antagonist, but other times, someone else is. 

Often, I find myself subject to this same kind of behavior: the manifestations of other people’s negative emotions. When kids are mean to me at school, I know it’s them taking out their own feelings on me. When boys around my age figure out that I love lifting weights and working out (I am a competitive swimmer), the comments start to flood in. They say, “You’re good at lifting. . .for a girl,” but it’s probably because they feel uncomfortable and insecure. They also say, “If you keep lifting, you’ll look way too manly,” or “I can definitely bench press more than you can,” or “You probably only workout to be skinny.” These comments can only come from one place: insecurity, more specifically, the feeling of being emasculated that they don’t want to deal with. They feel that seeing this girl who is much more disciplined and determined takes away their pride and their dignity. But in the end, the real issue is not how I make them feel, but how they respond to their feelings. 

So, there is a danger to feelings that we will do anything to rid ourselves of and not to feel. The bad news is that this behavior creates social hate in the world that feels too big to solve. But the good news is that the danger is not the emotion itself, but how you react to it, which means you can change yourself, and therefore the world. 

Most of our social problems can be solved if we solve how we relate to our feelings. The hate we give others–or experience from others–is often because we can not feel our own painful emotions. This creates things like racism and misogyny, as people take out their feelings on groups of people who can be targets. Now you see the danger of this pain. The damage that negative emotions cause to the soul, and the damage that these awful emotions cause to souls around you. Learning how to handle these emotions internally, instead of externally, is crucial to shaping a better society.