Being with emotion. Ew.
Letting emotion move through me. It's hard.
To deny the life of emotion and the process of feeling is to deny how alive we are and how inseparably bound up we are with one another.
-Prentis Hemphill
I’m exhausted.
My baby has just started crawling and wants to put my shoes in her mouth 98 per cent of the time. The other two per cent is allocated to electrical cords. She’s also figured out separation and never wants me to leave her thus making it very hard for me to poo in peace.
I have a vague suspicion that emotions are bubbling within me, begging to be felt, only I’m too busy mum-ing, so beneath the surface they must stay until I’m good and proper filled to the brim and ready to Britney 2007* all over everything.
I think there’s some stress there, and perhaps a hefty dose of whatever emotions come along with an identity crisis. Who knows?! But whenever I do have a moment to spare, instead of letting myself be with emotion, I reach for my phone.
In their book, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, Prentis Hemphill tells us that ‘feeling is the conscious allowance of emotion’ and ‘to deny the life of emotion and the process of feeling is to deny how alive we are and how inseparably bound up we are with one another’.
Feeling is letting emotion move through us, and in the process, transform us. It is allowing ourselves to be real raw humans who live together with other real raw humans on this beautiful planet. We are not, as tech companies want us to believe, avatars existing simultaneously in the simulated land of connection that is the interwebs.
But as important as it is, in this like and subscribe attention as commodity moment, it is way too easy to disrupt the process of feeling our feely feels and ignore our messy human-ness.
Right now, for me, emotions are seemingly inconvenient and are, therefore, traded in for the momentary distraction and systematic dulling screen time provides. Even as despair and devastation are invoked through real time images of genocide, war, police shootings, mass shootings and more, I feel the welling up inside, and then quick smart change apps, popping items that I don’t need into an internet shopping cart before low key scrolling Venmo to see who has been transferring money to whom and for what.
I’ll comfortably lean in to the emotion of envy that I feel when scrolling a stranger’s socials, though, which is partly why I’ve removed myself from most social media platforms. I’ll also get nice and snuggly with my good friend imposter syndrome as I late night scroll the ‘Stack (You’re a FAKE and a PHONY and I wish I’d never laid eyes on you, says my imposter syndrome… and also Sandy from Grease). In fact, I’m probably not feeling envy and all the imposter syndrome emotions at all, instead just listening to the negative feedback loop. Loud and on repeat.
The stuff I need to feel, the stuff that will allow for me to learn, and grow, and transform and just be a human in the world, that’s the stuff that I’m avoiding. In my last post I wrote that I’m learning to ‘be with hope and despair and chaos and calm and beauty and all of the icky gross hard stuff that life serves up’. But honestly, that’s really very hard.
Hemphill talks about booking a cry date for themselves. Which sounds glorious. Some kind of hot tub situation, a brilliant playlist, and unbridled tears. In giving themselves this time, Hemphill experiences the embodiment of emotion, and allows for it to move through and transmute.
Hemphill’s work, however, is offered from the perspective of a Black queer person and social justice activist living in a highly racialised United States of America. So, the wisdom within the pages of their book is not necessarily for white arse me who can’t feel because she’s busy caring for others and looking at her phone. My inability to feel is not, as Hemphill shares about their own experience, a learnt behaviour passed down through generations as a way to survive the horrors and legacy of chattel slavery.
It is also a whole other thing when expressed emotion is dismissed, pathologised, or villainised by society. Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color writes of the experience of women of colour:
“Women of color are rarely given the benefit of the doubt and even more rarely considered worthy of sympathy and support. If we are angry it is because we are bullies, if we are crying it is because we are indulging in the cult of victimhood, if we are poised it is because we lack emotion, if we are emotional it is because we are less rational human and more primitive animal.
Letting emotions move through us requires safety.
It also requires time, attention and a whole lot of self compassion. As Bessel van der Kolk teaches:
“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.”
Sometime this week I’m going to send paid subscribers a recorded meditation and journaling prompts for being with emotion. So, even after I’ve spent this entire post complaining about my own inability (unwillingness?) to feel, I am still going to send a small offering to you all so that maybe you can give the whole befriending yourself thing a go. I can’t listen to the meditation because it’s my voice and I would die of cringe.
You can read about why I’m somewhat qualified to be offering meditations and the like here. But please know that I am not in any way suggesting that my meditation is going to cure the systemic cultural and gendered issues that prevent people from embodying and expressing emotion. And since I’ve also broached the topic of race in this post, I really hope I’m not coming across all white saviour-y either. It’s really not my intention to be harmful… or a wanker… so, if I’m either or both of those things then I’m truly sorry.
The goal for myself is to find moments for feeling so that I can try and transform myself into the next iteration of me. When I notice myself getting hijacked by clickbait, I could make a choice to put my bloody phone down and check in with my heart. And when I notice my imposter syndrome being all chang-chang changity-chang-shoo-bop, I could go beyond the negative stories in my mind to see where that imposter syndrome lives in my body. I could breathe into it a bit. Shake it out. Pause. Be with what’s there. I could learn and grow and feel my aliveness. My glorious messy aliveness and the beautiful (if not sometimes frustrating) inseparable connection I have to others.
*I love 2007 Britney. She understandably went bananas in the most brilliant and perfect way. And also, if you’re struggling with your mental health please take care of yourself, and if possible, ask for help.
This email was composed where I am currently staying, which is the region now known as Central Victoria. I would, therefore, like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nation (in particular the Taungurung Nation), Traditional Custodians of the land for which I am on. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present.
So good! My son is 4 and we are still attached at the hip. I hope your girl gives you some peace soon!
I, too, have often thought to myself, “I’m about to go all Britney 2007 up in here (my head)….I even thought, in that same moment, “shaved head and all”—it makes sense & is so goddamn freeing!!!!” Hang in there, Momma. That Babe will be walking in your shoes (instead of chewing on them) in no time. You (and Britney—any year) are brave and moving through a powerful lump of experiences and emotions. ❤️