Can love be burned?
We can get burned by love, and we can burn in love, but could we burn love itself? If so, why would anyone do such a thing?
Honestly, I have no idea what the fuck I’m trying to process within myself with this contemplation right now. Professional burnouts? Romantic heartbreaks? Social nonsense? Or our collective ignorance (or just my own) about what love even means. I have no idea what kind of twisted traumas I’m dealing with right now, but my emotional body seems to be burning through some deep shit for real these days.
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Okay. How or where do we even start this? Are we really ready to explore that forest and dive further into those waters? Do you have enough capacity for forgiveness in yourself to witness the pain you might find there with compassion and grace? Do you have space in your heart and wisdom in your body to hold the frequency of joy it might create in you?
Can you be real and radically honest with yourself? Can you love yourself more than everything else around you? Should self-love always come before the love you give others?
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The flourishing epidemic of mental health touches me personally.
Even though I’ve never 'officially' studied or worked in that field, mental health has always been a direct or indirect part of my personal life.
For starters, my mother worked in a psychiatric hospital for most of her life. This made my upbringing very 'mental health' aware, and she did her best to make sure my brain worked perfectly. When I was a teen, I loved visiting her at work, not just because it was in a beautiful garden, but because I could chill with some really cool people: doctors, nurses, and sometimes other professionals or patients.
Since I was 3 years old, I’ve had a very challenging time properly managing and processing my emotions, but my brain has always worked like pure magic.
In kindergarten, I was 'diagnosed' as one of the smartest kids or a 'high-potential' child. They asked my mom to send me to a special school for little 'geniuses.' She refused, most likely to preserve my mental health and give me a normal childhood.
I was sent to a 'normal' school, where I was bored as fuck most of the time. I represented my school in most of the county-wide mathematics and physics competitions, but I was almost failing my math classes because I didn’t care to do the homework the teacher assigned (or sometimes even go to class because I had something more fun to do elsewhere).
I was smart, and I was unforgivably courageous in doing whatever the fuck I wanted since I was a child.
But I was emotionally explosive too. I felt everything too much.
I was just intense. I felt sadness deeply, externalized my anger easily, and was often possessed by joy and unstoppable laughter. I was probably the sweetest and most 'violent' child at the same time. I was likely very challenging and quite confusing for my family.
And as you can imagine, too much intensity and too many emotions are a perplexing reality for a child born into an Eastern European family. We’re not exactly known for our exceptional emotional extravagance (or maturity). We all somehow seem to compensate for our lack of emotional abilities with our mental capacities.
Everyone there is smart and clever. But they can also break your leg if you talk too much, shame your entire family for absolutely nothing, and might have never cried for real in their lives.
So, emotionally speaking, I’m not sure how 'smart' we truly are.
We are emotionally strong and almost indestructible, but we are not emotionally smart or wise.
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Where I live now (and have for the last 20 years), the culture is also deeply emotionally immature, but in a very different way and in regard to different emotions.
In Ukraine, we shame despair, but we almost honor anger.
In Quebec, we shame anger, but we almost glorify despair.
You bring a teenager conditioned in a place where despair doesn’t exist into a country where anger doesn’t exist, and it creates a very interesting emotional distortion in the nervous system of that child. The child might experience some challenges in adaptation and emotional re-education.
And I’ve been experiencing this distortion ever since, in many different ways.
I managed to control (or hide) my anger and become a nice, always-smiling Canadian. I mostly kept my anger to myself, but I was still not okay with starting to honor despair.
I burned inside when someone complained about their non-existent problems and did absolutely nothing about it. It drove me crazy to see people unhappy but completely powerless to change it. I got angry for them, but they seemed fine in their misery, repeating to me that anger is bad and should be shamed.
Anger enables you to protect your power.
If a child doesn’t understand this emotion or deeply represses their anger, they cannot properly defend themselves against intimidation or abuse. Anger is a psychological response to inappropriate power dynamics. Our world is full of very abusive and very fucked power dynamics. It’s important to learn how to navigate them without losing yourself, and your anger (if properly managed) is your biggest ally in protecting and defending yourself.
If your emotional system doesn’t know how to deeply listen and process anger safely and responsibly in your body, you’re more likely to be abused, manipulated, and feel completely powerless in your relationships with others.
If you don’t feel or if you shame anger, you make yourself blind to the systemic abuse and dysfunctional power dynamics around you.
You automatically put yourself in the role of the 'victim' by repressing or denying your anger. Because if you numb your anger for real, you accept a power-over dynamic somewhere in your reality, and you might not even realize it.
Anger protects your personal inner power and gives you clarity on how to effectively change a situation to re-establish the equilibrium of power dynamics in your relationships.
In Ukraine, anger is actually used as a very effective 'tool' for reconciliation.
When we’re angry with each other, there’s usually no consideration that our relationship might be broken because of it. We get angry mainly to fix our relationships, not to break them. We get angry to get better and happier, not to destroy our deep connection. We all have this mutual understanding, so we don’t mind yelling at each other from time to time because we know that afterward, we’ll actually become stronger together.
We traditionally saw anger as a medicine, not as poison.
After a good fight, we usually become friends who trust each other even more than before. We empower each other and fix the relational power incoherencies between us. And we move on.
I’ve seen almost all of my family members lose their shit at each other. Sometimes they even fought for real. But it was always done face-to-face, not behind the back. It was authentic, and it was intense. We were sometimes very 'violent' with each other, but we never stopped caring about our relationships and their overall coherence. We never broke our soul connections, and we still protect each other no matter what.
Anger protected us from truly abusing each other.
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In Quebec, emotionally speaking, I struggled a lot. I always felt like people preferred to silently abuse and be abused rather than frankly and honestly talk to each other about how they felt. I felt like people here didn’t understand that conflicts are meant to heal and transform our relationships, not be avoided, judged, or banned.
They seemed to prefer feeling deep resentment in their hearts over pure anger in their souls.
But resentment is way more complex, toxic, and even more dangerous than authentic anger. Anger is a pure, uncorrupted emotion in the now. Resentment is created in your head with time and energy. Dealing with a pure emotion is supposed to be easy and simple, but dealing with resentment might take you a lot of time and effort.
Anger is a very clear and direct medicine. Resentment is a very confusing and complicated soul-killer.
Resentment leads to despair. To depression. To jealousy and envy. To silent and unconscious hatred.
Anger can be intense.
Resentment is deeply toxic.
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Burnout: what’s it all about?
When I had my first burnout and tried to explain to my mother what the fuck I was going through, she literally couldn't comprehend it. (Mind you, she’s a mental health professional.)
She told me burnout doesn’t exist in Ukraine.
At the time, I was furious at her ignorance and lack of compassion, but now I think I’m starting to understand what she was trying to tell me.
Unprocessed, misunderstood, or unmanaged anger morphs into something else in our emotional system—something more complicated, confusing, and painful.
Her message was simple: If you’re mad, be smart and do something valuable with it. Don’t swallow or repress your deep anger because it might become even more unbearable later on.
She was right, but unfortunately, I didn’t listen. I didn’t let myself be authentically and honestly angry about the things that truly mattered to me. Instead, I allowed myself to become resentful. Over time, I lost my inner power because of it, slowly poisoning myself with despair over and over again.
I was terrified of being misunderstood, judged, and rejected for my profound anger at the deep nonsense and abuse in this world. So, I became something more ‘socially acceptable’ in this culture: a workaholic and performance-driven perfectionist.
I used my work as a tool to tackle dysfunctional power dynamics and invisible abuses in the system. Instead of channeling my anger, I used my brain and intelligence to fix the broken ‘system’ around me. I also used business and politics to transform my anger into deep resentment without even realizing it.
An overdose of unprocessed resentment was probably the main contributor to my burnout. Burnout dragged me to a place of despair and powerlessness I had never experienced before. And it crushed me even more.
My system couldn’t handle despair. (Remember, in the country where I grew up, despair was shameful and something to be avoided at all costs, so we never learned to deal with that emotion.)
I didn’t have the tools in my nervous system to handle the level of despair I felt during burnout. I had no idea what to do with that emotion, except to feel deep shame and profound guilt. I felt lonely and utterly confused. Real despair can consume my soul in seconds and wreck my heart for a very long time.
Facing the deep and terrifying despair alone, I felt completely powerless. I didn’t know how to master this emotion properly and safely in my system. I couldn’t comprehend what the fuck despair was trying to teach me or why I kept recreating despair-driven situations in my life.
Was it because I wasn’t allowed to express my authentic anger safely and in time?
I didn’t give myself the right to protect myself. I forbade certain parts of me from feeling anger. I wanted them to be nice and kind. I wanted them to shut up and sit still. I was scared of shocking or destabilizing others too much. I was afraid of showing and expressing how I really felt deep inside. I was scared of being emotionally intense. I was terrified of emotionally hurting the people I deeply loved and cared for.
So, I learned to internalize my suffering very skillfully, and I literally burned my own nervous system with my numbed emotional pain. I’ve done this a couple of times already.
I did it to ‘protect’ what I valued and believed in. I nearly destroyed myself to protect what I loved.
I paid a very high price with my own health and well-being for not knowing how to love and respect myself. I thought I was being true to my values and convictions to make this world a better place—and I was—but I forgot how to stay true to myself in the process.
I lost too much of who I truly was. I got lost in all the different roles I was playing. I got sick from over-responsibility for things that didn’t even matter that much to me.
I thought I knew how to love the ones around me, but somehow, without even realizing it, I forgot how to love myself one day. And when that happened, no one was there to love me. No one reminded me how to love myself again.
I guess I was expecting, or unconsciously counting on, receiving love from others when I truly needed it. I believed it was some kind of mutual exchange and understanding. I love you, you love me and we simply take care of each other. And we share this amazing feeling to create even more of it around us. But it didn’t happen that way for me. When I truly needed love and care to get better, I found myself completely lonely and rejected by the ones I fully trusted and deeply cared for. Harshly misunderstood, blamed, judged, and shamed.
I was rejected by the entire community around me for being too weak, too intense, and too angry.
People told me I was crazy and emotionally stupid for having emotions about the deep nonsense and unspeakable injustice of the world we live in. Everyone openly judged and shamed me, but no one could teach me how to stop feeling those emotions. No one could explain to me why no one else seemed to care.
No one could show me how to become blind to hungry children. How to become deaf to crying mothers. How to ignore the suffering of humanity. How to stop caring for the nature I deeply love and cherish. How to pretend everything is perfectly fine in this world and convince myself that I am the actual problem.
Some people said, “If you feel sad, take pills. This will fix your problem.”
But how exactly will this fix my problem? Can anyone explain that to me?
Maybe I won’t give a shit anymore about the suffering this world is currently enduring if I find some good drugs. That’s true. I’ll probably numb my pain or just forget about it. I’ll potentially find a way to act like I don’t care anymore. But will this fix my actual problem?
Will humanity stop violently abusing each other? Will we stop killing nature around us for no reason? Will we remain powerless and doomed (but very high on good-quality drugs together), or will we do something meaningful and real about our deep collective despair?
How long can we keep doing this? How long can we lie to ourselves and live in denial about our own ignorance? How long can we lack self-love so deeply and naively that we can’t even ensure our own desired future anymore?
If all of creation—humanity and nature—is as simple as pure, unconditional love, are we collectively burning love right now?
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