I’m definitely guilty of loving to listen to love songs that aren’t exactly examples of emotional intelligence. When I pay attention to the lyrics, I notice how most of them sound quite emotionally unhealthy. They talk about obsession, about not being able to live without someone, about losing yourself inside another person — total dependence and idealization. Rationally, we know that’s not the right way to deal with love. It’s confusing, sometimes even toxic, and far from what we’d call “conscious” — or even “true love.”
The curious thing is that singing those lyrics — even with all their irrationality — can end up healing some of the very toxicity they express. They’re almost manuals of emotional irrationality: exalting the kind of love that suffocates, the desire that traps, the attachment that disguises a fear of being alone. But what they truly give us is the right to be contradictory — to feel without needing to justify it. Because when we sing them, the unconscious breathes. It’s like the body saying what the mind tries to censor — that sometimes we don’t want to understand love, we just want to feel it.
And this contrast makes me think about the limits of the conscious culture we live in. These days, we’re constantly encouraged to be self-aware, balanced, and mindful. To analyze our emotions, label them correctly, regulate them before they spill over. At first glance, of course, that seems like progress. But is it really? Or is it just another way of putting our feelings into a box so they behave?
Sometimes I think being too conscious sterilizes life. It’s like gardening with gloves so thick you never touch the soil — you stay clean, but lose contact with what’s real. Because emotions don’t exist to be rational. They simply happen — often intense, often contradictory. And sometimes they linger even when they make no sense. If we try to control them all the time, we end up hardening inside, turning what could move us into something stagnant.
We feel it in our bodies when we cry listening to a song, or write something that makes no sense but feels right in the moment. It doesn’t fix anything, but it’s cathartic. It gives pain, anger, or longing a place to exist outside the body. It’s a cure that’s rationally absurd — yet unconsciously real.
I think that’s why we’re so fascinated by artists and their art — they’re not afraid to translate the untamed sides of human existence, the ones most of us try to hide. Art often stirs the underground desires of the collective and reveals what society insists on domesticating.
Artists have that freedom — but how do we carry the same fire into our routines, into ordinary days? How far does control protect us, and when does it begin to imprison us? The challenge is to find the balance between these two polarities — between lucidity and vertigo, between consciousness and instinct. We need both: moments of clarity and moments of total surrender, without justification. Because one without the other is only half the experience of being alive.
Feeling, here and always.
