What Makes an Emotional Person Like Me Stronger: Emotions

For such a long time, simply thinking about one person could bring me to the depths of shame, then lift me into a feeling of soaring euphoria. I would feel longing, affection, and yearning. Then came emptiness, worthlessness, inferiority, detachment, disappointment, and deep trust. Some people, simply by existing, awaken every sleeping emotion within me and make my life richer.

I used to think these emotions were my source of suffering. I wondered when these constant ups and downs would finally disappear. When would I finally become stable?

But now I understand myself a little better. I am someone who genuinely enjoys living in imagination and daydreams.

A single line from a song can turn me into the tragic heroine of a story. Then a book can suddenly make me feel like the most confident person in the world. Within my ever-changing thoughts and emotions, I get to experience a different version of myself again and again.

I am someone who needs to continuously infuse life with emotion in order to feel alive. To navigate the emotions that fill me to the brim, I have read books, studied psychology, written, and practiced meditation. The energies within me that could not find expression always searched for another outlet. Even amid emotional chaos, I learned to assign meaning, create structure, and gradually understand what I was feeling.

Thanks to my rich emotional world, I have been able to experience and refine countless emotions through songs, books, and imagination, even without personally going through certain events. Perhaps that is why I have always been drawn to people and environments that allow my imagination to unfold. In situations that were completely clear, stable, and intensely practical, I often lost my vitality and quickly withered.

Lately, however, I have been trying to avoid living solely in my emotions and abandoning things out of fear before ever experiencing them. I am now cautiously learning to bring those emotions into reality. Recently, I decided to turn thoughts into plans, practice consistently every day, and stay grounded even in the mundane realities of life. A schedule packed with practical goals and actions still feels unfamiliar to me—like a goldfish trying to breathe outside of water. So I often find myself retreating into my own “fantasy space.”

Still, I believe emotional people can turn their emotions into powerful strengths if they learn how to work with them. Many people reach middle age without truly knowing themselves, but we cry without hesitation, know what we love, and can eventually grow strong enough to feel our emotions without being overwhelmed by them. Perhaps that is also why we are often able to understand the emotions of others, even those we have never personally experienced.

Now I think I understand why, after work, I would put on my headphones, turn the music up loud, and try to separate myself from the world. Why I would surrender myself completely to the music and remain there as if intoxicated. It was never an act of escape. Rather, it was like a goldfish that struggles to breathe in a reality made up of 99% reason returning to the safety of the ocean, gathering strength before venturing back out again.

Looking back, those moments when I was gasping for air within my emotions were, paradoxically, the very moments that helped me sharpen and strengthen one of my greatest weapons: my capacity to feel.