Oleg A. (IEI) - Emotional States and the Need to Live Them Through to the End

There are certain emotions that seem to have to be lived through—they don’t just “fall off,” roughly speaking. For example, today there’s simply an hour set aside for sadness. Usually you just have to go through it, but afterward everything is fine. An emotion can come either from life or from a movie—there are different ways.

I fall into a certain state and stay in it for some time. I don’t want to force myself out of it until I feel that I’ve lived it through to a certain point. It feels safer that way, and I don’t lose anything. It turns out that even losing a bad emotion is a kind of small loss—you need to live it through, just like a joyful emotion, like any emotion at all. And then there comes a moment when I understand: everything is fine, that’s it, and I can already pull myself out of the emotion on my own—just go somewhere, to a shop, for example, and all these states pass quickly.

I don’t like forcing myself out, because then I become completely disoriented and don’t understand what to do. But if I give myself some time to live everything through, my brain works better afterward, more attentively.