Emotional Liberty

I’ve noticed a general feeling that the only expression we are allowed to have is niceness, no other interaction is permitted. What is wrong with this? What if a certain truth, a certain experience, a certain rebuttal isn’t nice? It might be brutally honest and by that very fact might be harsh. Does one have the right to defend themselves and to do so with the passion they feel? Or are they expected to suppress the true emotions they feel to keep up social niceties. Can you express your emotions with confidence without them being invalidated because they weren’t nice? Do we want to live in a world where no one is allowed to speak their minds and we can’t appreciate the full experience and importance of all these human emotions? Malicious action of course shouldn’t be encouraged but to quote hitch, “a gentleman is defined to be a man who is never rude by accident”. There is a time and place for rudeness, brashness and the other side of emotions and expressions besides the lollipops and butterflies. It would seem odd to me to live in a world where no one was allowed to show anything besides a smile, did we put soma in the water here? It is okay to be sad, to feel anguish, to feel beaten down and heartbroken. It is okay to lose hope at times, we shouldn’t live in a false world of hyper-positivity, a caricature of these predatory you can do anything life-coach, self-help people comes to mind. Life is hard, don’t belittle the real suffering people are going through by telling them they aren’t woke and wise enough and enlightened enough to just let every bad emotion brush off them. I think you can be striving towards improving your reactions to emotions learning to let the ones go you don’t wish to act on. However, when I’ve heard others try to say similar rhetoric, I worry we are making people feel guilty for having emotions more than we are helping them to work through them, there is a judgement towards those unable to end their suffering, rather than support for what they are experiencing. It isn’t to be trivialized. Life’s meaning is derived from the experiences we have, without the experience, without the conscious experience there is nothing to be had. Part of that experience is the sadness and suffering, to discredit that is to discredit the human experience. Life has a full spectrum of emotions and we should respect individuals’ abilities to express them, to feel them, to learn to use them and cope with them productively. If we shame people out of experiencing them, we rob them of what it is to be human.