Sarah Jones
Photography Editor
Trigger warning: Suicide and depression.
In my early twenties I nearly committed suicide. I’d spent four long years feeling awful, hating my life, hating myself, and waking up every day feeling like the world was seconds away from ending.
I remember deciding that I could either get in my car and drive until I hit a state where no one knew my name or I could drive to a nearby bridge and jump off. I honestly and completely felt that those were my only options.
Obviously I didn’t jump, and I promise I didn’t drive to Indiana. Instead I pushed my shame and fear aside, drove home, and started the long and very difficult process of putting myself back together. I wouldn’t be writing this today if I had listened to my feelings.
Because feelings lie.
My feelings told me that no one in the world felt as I did, that I was alone, unloved, and that I was worthless. But I am not alone (and never have been), I am worthy and capable of doing incredible things.
Recovery isn’t easy. It’s a long and complicated process that is unique to the individual.
In my battle I found that logic was one of my more powerful weapons. Doubt, fear, and self loathing would creep in and I would start to hate myself until I confronted my feelings with logic. Fear would tell me I was stupid, but my GPA gave me clear evidence that this was a lie.
Logic wasn’t my only weapon. I leaned on friends and family, learned to express my emotions honestly, and used faith as a reason to keep fighting. But on those nights when I couldn’t sleep and the world seemed bleak, logic was a sword and shield against the worst my feelings had to offer.
During this time my greatest ally was Startrek’s Spock who was also fighting back his emotions with logic.
“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end,” says Leonard Nimoy, who played my logical hero.
Unlike Spock (a half human, half Vulcan), I am human, and this means that I had to learn to balance raw emotion with undeniable logic. I don’t depend on logic because I am naturally logical, but because I’m naturally emotional and I need logic in order to see the world clearly.
“Logic will never change emotion or perception,” says Edward de Bono, famed psychologist, physician and author. But in my experience logic did change the way I felt about the world and the perceptions I had about myself.
Logic forced me to judge my emotions against fact and when the two agreed I knew I had found truth. But when logic proved my feeling wrong I had to learn to accept that what I felt wasn’t necessarily right.
I can still trust my instincts, I still cry and get angry, but I never allow how I feel about something to force me into hating myself or the world around me.
If I have a strong feeling, I listen to it but then I judge it against facts and logic. If the feeling is wrong, logic brushes the emotion out of my system. If the feeling is accurate then logic agrees and I can trust what I am feeling. Logic and feelings are not to be used in opposition but in collaboration.
I encourage readers to judge their emotions carefully and to use logic to check that what they feel is true and trustworthy because without logic we cannot trust what we feel.
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