When Emotions are Swept under The Rug

I was doing an interview, and the guy asked me... He said, "Tell me about what happened when your dad put you on the plane and told you to go. Like, you know, you're going to America by yourself and you may never see...like, you may see them assuming whatever, but you were like... What did you think in your mind? Did it occur to you that you may never see your parents again, or your dad, your brothers, you know?" And I said, "I don't know. I just remember I was here, in New York." He was like, "Well, what happened? What did you think about?" I'm like, "I don't know." And he kept questioning me. And for the first time in 42 years...well, I know is I was 15, 27 years, he kept asking me, so I came to a place where I was like, "I don't remember." And then I just... I was back. I was a little girl again who was 15 in that split second, and the camera was looking at me, and I was like, "Turn it off." I couldn't think straight because I was thinking, "Turn this *** off," because I realized there are things I have never dealt with. It triggered me, but then it triggered a lot of other ***, because I realized that because I'm a survivor at my core, I've gone through all these things and made it better. Like, "What did I do when I came to the States?" I ended up getting a job, working. My parents, everybody came. My family was here. We've made it work, you know. When I got cancer, what did I do? I laid in bed in chemo and built a charity, you know. Like, I don't know how to... I never... I don't deal with stuff in a sense where I sit there, and think, "Well, you know, I'm a victim, whatever." I think, "How do I fix things?" Which is a good thing. It's a good thing to be a fixer and put, you know, make things better, and beautiful, and all that. But what happens when you don't deal with things is they just, they go under a rug, and the dirt built up and built up. And so when that guy asked me that question, something triggered in me, and from that time it triggered all these other things that were happening. And this year, probably around January, I thought, "I'm having a freaking meltdown." I was having a freaking, like a total... I couldn't function. I was crying all the time. I didn't want to eat or I ate too much. I couldn't sleep. I was having nightmares. And I'm like, "What the ***'s wrong with me?" One of my friends said, "Maybe you should see a therapist." I was like, "For what?" But I began seeing this woman, all this stuff that I had never dealt with that's coming up from me and there is... I'm able to, like, deal with it now, and let it go. But I wonder how much of that stuff contributes to our health? You know, look at my health and getting... I'm not saying that my stress and what I've been through caused my cancer, but there's... Women have so many different health issues, like, we deal with, but we carry so much of our lives and burdens inside for other people and don't deal with our emotions. And so right now, I'm all about sharing, maybe oversharing to an extent, but I've kept so much inside for so long until I got to be 40-something years old and realized, there's so much *** that I hadn't dealt with. So, you know, it's important to me to give my daughter, other women, other people, a platform to deal with their authentic self, whatever that is, you know, whether it's *** up, whether it's...you know, labels, take it off.