How to Feel
On emotions and other inconveniences
Artists are known to be a bit off, inclined to sadness and loud weeping and hours of gazing into the middle distance whilst wearing black turtlenecks and/or stained sweatpants. There are all sorts of terms to describe this type of individual — “highly sensitive person;” “melancholic temperament;” “raging alcoholic with a penchant for whimsical site-specific dance sculpture” — but ultimately, I have always known I was one of them. Perhaps, if you are inclined to read an essay with this title, you are one of us, too.
I am more than a bit off, probably. I like to think I live in a modern witch hut or a tiny magical library, but in truth my little apartment looks like a moody third year Mythology and Folklore minor (Communications major) découpaged her feelings all over mid-2000s generic NYC bro decor.
As an aside, regarding said bro decor: my kitchen has three different types of wood. They don’t look good together. They don’t even make sense together. I moved back to New York in 2021 and have had few visitors, but most of them comment on the wood thing at some point.
This is the trouble with artistic friends: they notice.
One tough thing about being an artist inclined to loads of feelings — which is to say, being an artist — is that when one is down in the dumps, one may have a very hard time motivating oneself to actually make one’s art.
I found it easier to churn the words out when I still drank and wasn’t in good therapy. After all, working is one of my favorite ways to not feel my feelings, and if I could create work for myself in the form of deadlines, I could stave off the inevitable emotional crash and burn for quite awhile.
Taking care of oneself is, as it turns out, not easy. It is time-consuming, which I did not expect. It is quite irritating to have committed oneself to feeling one’s feelings as they arise, accepting without judgement the accompanying tears, temporary stuffed nose, difficulty focusing, tight jaw, swollen eyes, tense neck and back.
I get up in the morning and do my stupid little stretches, which help with the physical pain; I do my therapy sessions, which help with everything. I fucking meditate, of course.
I am not used to feeling things so clearly and distinctly in my body and otherwise. I used to just skip right over the feelings and do stuff with words, until the feelings tunneled through the walls of the prison I’d so generously built for them, and I ended up sick, exhausted, and unable to write.
I always loved books. I remember clearly the moment the idea of words on a page translating to stories suddenly made sense to me. I was three years old, sitting in my mother’s lap, and she was reading a little board book about a puppy. It just clicked, and suddenly I knew what reading was. By the time I was four, I was reading above whatever random assemblage of factors constituted “grade level” at the time. By the time I was six or seven, I knew I wanted to write books one day.
Later, I knocked standardized test scores out of the park. In the seventh grade, I achieved an excellent score on the SAT Verbal portion, something I never came close to doing with math. I was physically uncoordinated, with poor eyesight and near-constant anxiety and shyness, and the boys on the bus told me I was ugly, and sometimes I pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school, and sometimes I was so afraid on the bus or in the car that I felt like I was going to choke or throw up, but I could knock out one hell of a five-paragraph essay on bottlenose dolphins.
I won awards for writing, as a child and as a teen. Like any artist given consistent early praise for her work, I saw my art as part of my identity. I was a writer. That’s who and what I was, always.
I was a writer, sure, but I was also a human who did not know how to identify and describe her own feelings. This proved to be a problem, eventually.
When someone asked me a few years ago how I felt in my body as I sat and talked to them about dark and troubling things, I couldn’t give them an answer.
“Awake,” I said finally. “Literally, I know I’m awake and talking to you. I don’t mean, like, metaphorically enlightened.”
“Right,” they said. “I knew what you meant.”
They had not, as it turned out, mistaken me for someone who was enlightened or, perhaps, even moderately self-actualized.
“But how does your stomach feel?” they asked.
“Um,” I said, and paused for awhile. “I guess…not currently hungry?”
I had to be taught how to identify and describe subtle and even some moderate physical sensations. These lessons began in my late thirties and they are ongoing. I am not used to it yet, but I am better at it than I was before.
I used to sit for hours at a computer, hunched over, and I wouldn’t even notice that my back was screaming for relief or that my feet were numb. I just blasted past it. It wasn’t because I was strong. I just couldn’t feel it.
Do you know what I mean? Have you done this at a laptop, or a canvas, or building something or installing something (perhaps three types of wood that actually look great together?)
Do you ever notice mysterious bruises and wonder where the hell they came from? Or learn to your surprise that the pain you’d occasionally perceived in your tooth actually required a root canal?
Kind of funny how that can become a badge of pride.
“Stuff just doesn’t really bother me unless it’s really bad,” we might say with a studiously casual shrug.
What we’re really saying is, “Whatever happened to me fucked me up to the extent that I function like a really tall sauropod dinosaur who has a yucky feeling in the base of its throat but has to wait for the pain signal to slowly crawl up the ten zillion foot long recurrent laryngeal nerve and reach its brain, theoretically.”
Paleontology is the only science class in which I got an A+. Also, I am absolutely lying to you; I never took Dino Bones 101. In fact, I just vaguely remembered something we learned in an elementary school unit on dinosaurs and did a Google.
When our human experience of pain — physical, emotional, mental — is dulled except for the most intensely undeniable sensations, we may find the same is true with pleasure. This is a dangerous way to move through life.
First, with regard to pain, we may miss signals that something is amiss. When one is inclined to high achievement, high performance, and high productivity, one is like a ballerina who dances on an injury night after night for fear of losing her place in the production. It gets worse and worse. Inevitably, something snaps.
Second, with regard to pleasure, we may feel dull and empty at times that are reasonably pleasant and enjoyable. When we cannot take satisfaction or delight in the smaller sensations, we may seek big sensations. We may even engage in risk-taking behavior in pursuit of something, anything that actually makes us feel good.
Enough has been written about the artist as addict, and I don’t need to belabor the point here. You know as well as I do that big highs can be followed by big lows.
All that arises will soon subside. Feelings are not always pleasant, and are sometimes quite terrible, but they are knowable and identifiable. And they always leave eventually.
When I feel lonely (see what I did there? I identified a feeling!) it is important to experience it but not wallow in it. This is a delicate balance and I do not have the hang of it. I have learned I cannot get married to the loneliness or any other feeling or sensation, because it will leave me — perhaps not at the altar, but not long after. Something else will join it, or replace it entirely.
Tonight I could have gone to a party with people I like very much, but I felt off. I felt lonely, and the solution was not to be among lovely, funny chattering people, but to be quiet. If I had gone out, I would’ve felt lonely among friends, which is worse than feeling lonely by oneself.
I chose to be alone. A wave needed to break on the shore before it could withdraw back into the vast and unknowable expanse from whence it came.
I do not know why I am inclined to loneliness. Perhaps it is an inheritance.
Near the end of his life, Carl Jung finally wrote (or more properly dictated to an assistant) a memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Decades before the terms epigenetics or intergenerational trauma were in common use, he came to a realization while working on a stonecarving project.
I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete or perhaps continue things which previous ages had left unfinished.
I wonder what we do with what was done to those who came before us. Do we carry all of this in our bones, or is it in our flesh, our organs? Are they mixed into the clay a rebellious god used to form us?
I have given up trying to build walls around feelings. I mean that I have given it up for today. It is an old habit, and perhaps it was not of my own invention, so I must choose over and over again to not do it.
To employ a very trendy phrase, emotional boundaries are good. But walls around emotions? Foolish. Impossible. Emotions are water. They lap or crash against walls and wear them away. Then comes the flood.
I am embarrassed to say any of this to you. But my back hurts now, because I’ve sat for too long, and I must go and tend to it. This is part of what I am learning to do.
I still do not know why I have always been inclined to loneliness. But I will tell you the truth about why I felt lonely this time. I will not blame it on my grandmother’s grandmother’s pain, though I may carry that and more.
There is a door in my heart, and against my old instincts, I open it sometimes and let someone walk around in there for awhile. When they exit, I feel the loss acutely, which is why I do not open the door often.
But even when they go, they never really leave. Maybe they, too, are a part of me now.
***
This essay was originally published on Medium.