you're allowed to feel all the feels you want to feel

why aren't women allowed to be bitter? sometimes bitter is what you should be feeling.
i find that women are constantly under watch by the emotion police. especially nigerian women. you cannot talk about something your ex did to you without being labelled bitter. you cannot talk about your experiences without some idiot coming out and calling you bitter, telling you that if you'd moved on that you wouldn't still be talking about it.

you also probably shouldn't be around people who ask you how long a friendship/relationship lasted and then use your answer to estimate what you should or should not be feeling. trying to undermine your experiences with the amount of time that person was in your life. no matter how small a time you spent with someone, it doesn't change the fact that love - either romantic or platonic love - changes you in some small or really ridiculously huge way. it doesn't change the fact that this person was in your life for a certain amount of time, it doesn't matter that y'all knew it would end, it doesn't matter that y'all thought it'd last forever, it doesn't matter what the intentions were.
but when love ends, you're allowed to mourn, you're allowed to feel what you're feeling.
if bitter is what you're feeling, you're allowed to be bitter. don't let anyone bully you into pretending that you're not feeling anything. feel what you want to feel. you don't owe anyone any explanation or justification for your feels. feel it and then move on.

also, people need to realise that what you felt when something happened to you doesn't necessary mean that someone else should feel that same way. this is something i struggle with too. i find that sometimes i get over things quite easily, i gangsta through my feelings and move on but i need to realise that just because that is how i process things doesn't mean that that is how someone else should process their feels. let people feel what they are feeling, don't tell them what they should be feeling instead.

you don't always have to be the bigger person, the do-what-is-right person. this right here is something i struggle with sometimes in my life. i find that sometimes i do things because i know it is the right thing to do, not necessarily because i want to do them. this person did this? cut them off. this person said that? let them go. i never allow myself to feel what i'm feeling and accept that i'm human and others are human and sometimes people mess up and sometimes i'm allowed to mess up, and i'm allowed to feel what i feel and sometimes i should do what i want to do not what someone else wants me to feel or act how i think someone else wants me to act. sometimes, i wake up and wonder if i had just gone with what i was feeling if things would be different, instead of going with what i know i should do. i also struggle with advising my friends. i'm working on letting my friends know that they're allowed to do what they want to do, feel what they want to feel. i might think that it's stupid and i might think why don't you just get over it? but i never want anyone to wake up 5 years later and think - maybe if i had made that phone call, maybe if i had reached out. i never want anyone to stifle their emotions in this bid to be the one who moves on the fastest and wake up years later to realise that they have all these issues because they never learnt to feel their emotions and that in a bid to move on so quickly they ended up not resolving why something ended and why they no longer feel the need to feel what they felt.

here ends my rant of the day.
did not proofread.

love,
leggy