Are you sentimental? Are you embarrassed by your sentimentality? My answer would be yes and yes, despite spending a lifetime relying on discipline in emotional matters. In reining in and reigning over my emotions. In fact, I make a concerted effort not to seep into sentimentality.
Easier said than done! This has been especially true in the past few weeks, on my own at the holidays, unable to spend this precious family time with my boys. But for a change, I’m willing to admit it. Willing to confess to my sentimentality.
Sentimentality Defined
Dictionary.com defines sentimentality as follows:
the quality or state of being sentimental or excessively sentimental.
And being sentimental is defined as expressing
… tender emotions and feelings, as love, pity, or nostalgia
An additional meaning includes the word “mawkish.” Eeeek! Mawkish is precisely what I don’t want to be, ever. Would you? Mawkish is defined as “weakly” emotional to the point of being “slightly nauseating.”
Alright then. Let’s hear it for not nauseating anyone with our expressions of emotion!
This implication that sentimentality is all about overdoing it is what I have feared for most of my life. Going too far. Going too far with showing any emotion whatsoever. Being unable to control what others might perceive as “excessive” or for that matter, unappealing, uncomfortable, or intrusive.
This reticence to display my emotions to others is easily traced back to my childhood, and the fact that my mother’s histrionics (and guilt trips) often made others around her ill at ease. She was the queen of overdoing it — overdoing everything – including an inappropriate show of whatever she happened to be feeling. Is it any surprise that I might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction?
Wandering Through the Past?
During the first few months of Covid stay-at-home restrictions, as I was puttering around my place, I routinely bumped into old Polaroids in the back of a drawer or drawings by my kiddos in the bottom of a box. And oh, when I run across their angelic (devilish?), cherubic (mischievous?) little faces in a digital file!
I. Just. Melt.
These strolls down memory lane bring a tear to my eye, hardly unusual given empty nest and a period of significant separation. Besides, it’s human nature to recall the past fondly, (unintentionally) recreating our recollections as they suit a mood or circumstance. Often, this recreation of the past places us as the hero in our own stories. But in my case, I’ve too often cast myself as the villain, wrongly.
When it comes to long-dead relationships, not to mention the negative impacts of divorce on my children, I’ve been struck by the number of years I’ve wasted giving over scarce emotional space to self-recrimination. I’ve relived the good, the bad, and the terrible (endings), expending far too much time chastising myself (foolishly) for “what I could’ve done to save” these relationships. And I clung to words, images, and objects that conjured a difficult past.
Pointless. And dumb! Dumber still, I chalked these habits up to sentimentality, which now seems off-base.
Are We More Sentimental as We Grow Older?
So what exactly was I hanging onto? And what confusing cocktail of feelings, including sentimentality, was I trying to strike from my emotional being? So what if I’m “sentimental” in the privacy of my home? And is sentimentality inevitable as I grow older?
As for past relationships, what was I trying to process? How many years would I bang my head against old walls of self-recrimination in the chapters of my heart’s history? Could I at least trim back to the Cliff Notes version? Could I accept the conflicting mix of feelings that this stage of life, especially in “isolation,” invariably brings to the surface?
Still, not a fan of excessive emotion, I believe in striking sentimentality. Striking my own sentimentality right off my digital devices and freeing up space. Specifically, that means keeping mementos of my children (and many with their father) but otherwise deleting the trail of images associated with failed relationships. More importantly, this requires me to delete my tendency to disproportionately blame myself when relationships don’t work out.
And so… DELETE, DELETE, DELETE. I did it! My, but it felt good. Liberating! A sort of sentimentality streamlining to accompany the other sorts of streamlining that empty nesters — some of us, anyway — engage in.
A Note on the Highly Sensitive Person’s Experience of the World
Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) are often described as romantics and idealists, among other things. They tend to be extremely attentive to details, emotional and otherwise, often overlooked by others. Does this lead to greater sentimentality? And is that a problem? Is that my problem?
I couldn’t say whether or not sensitive people, especially “highly sensitive” people are more likely to be sentimental; I admit to both sensitivity (over sensitivity?) and my susceptibility to bittersweet memories, hopefully not to the point of mawkishness. I also admit to being easy prey to tearjerkers on the tube.
Does that reflect an excess of any sort, emotionally speaking? If any of us feels deeply, is that really such a problem? What about the ability to view the breadth of complexity in relationships, including past relationships, reinforcing the desire not to dismiss them out-of-hand? Is that sensitivity? An excess of sensitivity? Empathy? Something else?
Lest you consider me cold in my ability to delete (at last!) videos and candids of past amours, one in particular, I confess that I nonetheless have saved love letters, cards, and trinkets that will always remind me of giving, feeling, and being in love.
Saying Goodbye, Letting Go
My desire to “delete” facets of the past isn’t about forgetting, but it is about saying goodbye — including to misplaced blame as concerns relationships that fizzled — all the while honoring what was good in each significant connection. It is about accepting change with more grace than I have in the past — yet another challenge. It is about letting go of certain dreams in order to make room for others and moving forward rather than perpetually glancing back.
But letting go is painful even as we know it frees up space — just as we periodically clear our drives and iCloud storage.
Now, those drawings and paintings by my boys? Smiling snaps from their childhood? I adore them all! And I have been neatly boxing and labeling when I can — an hour here, an hour there — treasuring these tangible reminders of mirth, mischief, and joy.
Everything else? I may not be striking my sentimentality exactly, but I’m working to streamline it, and slowly making progress.
Have you cleaned out any emotional baggage lately? Do you hang on to mementos, letters, and odds and ends for too long? What about your digital images and videos? Are you more sentimental now than you used to be? If so, does it bother you?
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