14. Mawkish

Mawkish


[MAW-kish]

Adjective. Exaggeratedly sentimental or emotional.

The word of the day today is mawkish which means overly sentimental or emotional. I can only relate to the second part of that. I've been so emotional since I've been pregnant. I'm bawling as I type this. I'm just so sad and I feel so lonely. I've felt sort of empty this fall. I know if I was still teaching I wouldn't feel this sad but I'd definitely be stressed to the breaking point. Now that I don't teach and I spend so much time alone, I just feel empty. Godamnit though, I have it so good. I have the most flexible schedule anyone could ask for as a contractor. My team is great to me. The company may be a dumpster fire right now, but my team is amazing. Will I just always be unhappy with something? I don't want to be that person.

Maybe mawkish isn't the most fitting word--it's probably closer to schmaltzy or something that makes you cringe like soap operas. What I'm feeling is just pure emotion, pure sadness, and maybe some self-pity and definitely some self-judgment and self-hatred. Maybe not hatred but dislike or disinterest.

I'm reading a book with some coworkers called "Permission to Feel" and maybe that's what's letting me open the floodgates up. It's written by Marc Brackett of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a guy who helped create something called the RULER curriculum to teach kids and adults to recognize, understand the root of, label, express, and regulate emotions. We're basically comparing it to the SEL programs we write, and certain parts have brought up intense emotions for me. But that's a good thing according to the book--we repress our emotions so much that we don't understand them or the root of them, so we never really solve the problem. So I'm going to take a stab at going through this RULER process since it's totally new to me. It'll be hard because I have limited emotional vocabulary like most people, but I'm going to take a stab at it:

R - Recognize
I recognize that I'm feeling sad, lonely, and aimless.


U - Understand
I understand that the root of these feelings are judgments I'm assigning to them. I'm looking at myself and realizing my life is slowing down. I'm 37. I'm working from home and pregnant and have a very limited social life. My best friend is my husband. I feel lame. I think that's lame actually, because lame isn't really a feeling.


 L - Label
To better label my emotions than just to say I'm lame, I could say I feel bored, lonely, or unfulfilled.


E - Express
I could express these emotions by writing here, or telling my friends or husband. They'd probably suggest something I could do to feel better.

R - Regulate
It's pretty easy to regulate your emotions when they're relatively harmless. It'd be harder if I was feeling anger. But now that I know why I'm feeling sad, I actually feel less sad.

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