You're probably asking what emoequilibrium is.
During my final year of architecture school, I took a photography class. I finally met other students with different perspectives coming from different majors. We see students from other majors infrequently as we're just holed up in our building after finishing any gen eds that we have. Meeting new friends here was exactly when I came to coin the term emoequlibrium.
As I was designing a space to cry for my thesis, one of my friends in chemistry compared it to equilibrium. Equilibrium refers to getting as close as possible to a stable state but never being able to reach it or stay there. It's the constant push and pull from all the different forces that keeps it from staying at 0. This immediately struck me as the same way that we process emotions. If we think about anger and sadness as the two ends of the spectrum, we can take this concept and apply it to our own emotions. Taking time out of the equation, our mental state constantly fluctuates between the two. We'll never be in a neutral state where we don't feel anything. Even if we're not all the way at one end or the other, there's no point in saying we're completely fine.
After a while, we always end up moving away from that state of zero. It might be that your friend ticked you off, your family started asking you to do a few tasks, or even something as small as the temperature in the room that annoyed you. Anything at all can and will push you off of that neutral state.
Now that we've established that our emotions are always in flux, what can we do to help us reach the center again? Just like chemistry, there has to be another force that brings us back to being more neutral.
Let’s say anger is at 1, neutral at 0, and sadness at -1. If we started at 1, say, maybe because of the train being stuck on our commute to work in the morning, we usually have to calm down to at least negotiate ourselves back towards 0 before working or chatting with coworkers. Everyone has a different coping technique to negotiate with their own internal feelings. That might be making your morning coffee, texting a friend about it, or just letting time ease those feelings into the ground. These are the mechanisms that we realized that work for ourselves, but I've realized that when everything goes down the drain, the technique that we've all shared since birth to remediate Our emotions is; crying.
No matter where you are on the spectrum from -1 to 1, you need a cathartic release. Our emotions vary way too much. You dump the load off your shoulders but eventually, the load will come back. You get sad, you get angry, and sometimes, talking to a friend or working out just isn't enough.
At those points, we can't help but just cry.
Crying is almost like an emotional trash can. You can cry when you get sad. You can cry when you get angry. Even when you don't know what you're feeling and you're just confused about your feelings, you can cry. The best thing is, in all of those situations, crying helps you get back to that neutral state of zero.
Crying is that universal language that we all understand. It's the one method that we all share to cope with and understand our emotions, the most fickle thing about us that makes us human.
With emoequilibrium, it puts our existence into perspective. Our emotions are what make us human and we need a dependable way to regulate them.
Helping others understand that crying is healthy and that it's okay to cry is something that I'm extremely passionate about. Emoequilibrium is one of the terms that I'd love for us here to all become familiar with to understand that no matter what life throws at us, everything will eventually be okay.
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