Of course, as we grow older, this purity becomes a little scattered and complicated.

As we move into our teens, we begin wrestling with our emotions, especially as life introduces options and choices. We also experience mixed emotions for the first time: a little bit of envy, a dash of admiration, and a dollop of disappointment. Gone is the purity of emotion, replaced by the confusion of multiple simultaneous emotions. It’s like the emotion gods accelerated how many emotional waves are crashing on our shore.

Eventually, we move into early to mid-adulthood, often with mixed and messy emotions, which often aren’t given time to form and develop a voice. Who has the time to feel emotions when juggling work, home, kids’ needs, caregiving, community activities, ETC? And, yes, there’s a lot of fucking, etcetera! So, what do we do? We outrun our emotions until we hit the dreaded midlife crisis—when our feelings catch up with us and demand our attention.

And that, my friends, is when we can connect with our true emotions. It’s when we can stop trying to imitate and impress and focus on our emotional sobriety. For some of us, it might be when we shed our first tear in decades or when we begin to feel a deep sense of emotional integration unlike anything we’ve felt since we were a four-year-old.

If you haven’t felt this kind of emotional fluency yet, c’mon down to MEA for a cry, a giggle, and a hug.