By Samantha McKenzie

Emotions are a part of every human being. They are the fine arts of the human soul, the lighthouse that guides the ships to shore and the part of us that distinguishes the truth from the lie.

We are women. We are beautiful complex human beings. This has both fascinated and perplexed mankind from the beginning of time. We’ve been described as enigmas by the ancient and sorcerers by the mystics. We’re even called crazy and told that we are from another planet.

But we are none of these things.

Truthfully, we are just the other gender that feels comfortable and quite natural expressing our emotions. Often. Almost always. Without any prelude. We just emote. We express our love as well as our anger, although we secretly yearn that the former significantly outweighs the latter.

We can care so deeply about everything and everyone, that when something hurts us or the ones we love, we display our feelings in very dramatic ways. Sometimes even in traumatic ways. But let’s face it, our emotions sometimes earn us a bad reputation. We’re in need of an emotional makeover.

There’s probably a host of reasons why, but for the sake of time, I’ll start with the obvious: stress. And lots of it. There’s been an acutely intense increase in the amount of pressure we have endured for the past 50 years. It’s almost unnatural. And while women are resilient, strong and incredible individuals, I don’t believe it was ever intended for us to carry so much upon our shoulders. Stress from work, home, family, community, responsibilities, you name it, the list is never ending. To further add to this crisis, we are also barraged with media intake and information overload. We are seduced by people’s lives – real or fake, we can be found watching, listening, absorbing, comparing and reflecting on the others. It’s left our emotions in a state in a frenzy.

We sound like we need a grown up timeout. The truth is our depth of emotions is what makes us so powerful and beautiful. When used for good, our emotions have given us access to our third eye and our gut feeling. When we are in tune with our emotional self we can sense danger, hurdle obstacles and ward off evil. We sense the sweeter things too, like sincerity and genuineness and goodness.

It’s time we did an inventory of our emotions and refine our powers. Are we acting mad when we really are just sad and disappointed? Are we feigning happiness when we really are just indifferent? Are we melancholy more often than not? Is the hurt lasting longer than it used to? Are we still closed off to love? Are we hypersensitive? Scared?…Are we?

Let’s begin a rebranding of our emotions. How about we use hurt and disappointment as teaching tools instead of crutches. Try trading in pangs of jealousy with positive self-affirmations. Let’s agree to retool that powerful part of us. I’m all for letting go and enjoying my emotions that reflect cheer, and joy and laughter.

Let’s choose to master maturity and plug into the new and improved, slightly favorable and definitely more attractive you. Good luck!