One of my best and worst talents is the ability to suppress my emotions in stressful situations. It helps, when things are hectic and I can’t get too emotionally vested just so that I can function more effectively. In instances of extreme stress like emergency situations I see how it can be a good thing. But sometimes I unintentionally will push something away and then after days and months of it happening have some sudden realisation and have the world crumble under me.
The best example for such a situation is when I was leaving Spain after spending a year as an exchange student. For weeks before I left, my best friend Erica often broke into tears saying she would miss me when I was gone. But it hadn’t hit me. My friends all wrote letters for me and gave me little presents and although I loved the gesture, it still didn’t help me realise my exchange was going to be ending soon. On my last day my host family came to drop me to the airport. We exchanged tight hugs and kisses and left each other on a very vibrant note.
I then passed through the security check and sat down in front of my boarding gate. While putting my boarding pass back into my handbag, I found a letter my friend Claudia had written me. I hadn’t read it yet and for some reason felt like that was a good idea to read the letter.(BAD IDEA)
Five lines into the letter I had beads of tears trickling down my cheeks and they just didn’t seem to stop. From then right through the two hour flight to Paris I cried like a baby looking at all my cards and pictures of my host brothers. It just hit me that those brats wouldn’t look the same the next time I saw them.
I then got off the flight still sniffing from all the crying. I had to transfer terminals to catch my next flight so I zoomed from one terminal to another. When I reached the gate to board the next flight, the ground staff informed me that the gates had closed. Unable to mentally react thanks to me being so emotionally dysfunctional I lost control and started crying at the counter. At this point my mother and sister were on a flight to Bombay from Istanbul and my boyfriend of that time didn’t know I was getting back as I had was trying to surprise him. With noone to be my emotional crutch I realised my only way to securing a bed that night was if I got my act together and booked myself a hotel and figured my return flight to Bombay.
Ultimately in whatever condition and help from a lot of people, I managed to spend a night at a hotel at the Paris airport, eating some spaghetti bolognese as I fell asleep watching die hard 2.
I sometimes can’t even wrap my head around how quickly my emotions can drift in the span of no time.
Nizah Knows Nothing 