What’s that thing I’m feeling?
This week has been hard, but not the “my life turned upside down and I’m knee deep in a new crises” hard.
It’s a different flavor, and for four days I didn’t know what to call it.
What I did know is I’d eaten all the mint chip ice cream in my freezer, and I hadn’t left the house. I blamed my heavy workload. The cold weather (San Francisco summer special). Laziness.
“When we’re sensitive, each of our feelings is for an actual reason. It’s just usually not for a reason in the physical plain, so it’s harder to identify.”
Sensitive AF
As a highly sensitive person, I sense what is happening around me long before it has a name. Sometimes I never find the words. Sometimes I don’t even notice the feeling. But the impact is still there, mixing with my own experiences of the world.
My dear friend Becca Borrelli is an art teacher and professional doodler based in Austin, TX. She’s also a fellow highly sensitive person.
Becca hosts a podcast called Secret Sauce, about the secret ingredients in life and work. On one episode, she shares her initial relationship to sensitivity:
“I thought there was something inherently wrong with me. I was feeling so much of the underbelly of the world, and I didn’t have any help navigating that from my family, friends or culture.”
In March, I wrote about a migraine that knocked me out after being headache free for five years. The event happened 48 hours before San Francisco went into its first Shelter in Place. While I was not consciously nervous about the new ordinance, the city was humming with anxiety. The anxiety overwhelmed my system, and I shut down.
I was frustrated by the unexpected migraine and my “overly sensitive” body. However, when the Shelter mandate was announced, I (ironically) felt better. Now I understood what I had been feeling, and I could take action.
Susan David, an award winning author on emotional agility and professor at Harvard Medical School, shares my sentiment. From her TedTalk:
“Words are essential… when we label our emotions accurately, we’re more able to identify the precise cause of our feelings, which allows us to take concrete steps. Our emotions are our data.”
This week, my emotion was despair.
Despair, as defined by Merriam Webster, means “loss of hope or confidence.”
(Note: when you have to look up how to spell Merriam Webster on Merriam Webster, you know it’s bad.)
COVID-19 cases are on the rise, and the initial roar of the Black Lives Matter movement has leveled out to a hum (which I deeply hope will rise again). The economic impact of the pandemic on local businesses, families, and even public services like the San Francisco CalTrain is glaringly harsh. Our country’s leadership… continues to make me scream into a pillow.
I share these things not to bring us all down. The air is thick enough as it is.
I share because there is so much going on, and whether you’re a highly sensitive person or someone who rarely talks or thinks about feelings, chances are the intensity of what is happening has touched you in a significant way.
I spent my life thinking there was something wrong with me — I had so many needs and feelings that others couldn’t see, and I couldn’t explain.
Making friends
It wasn’t until a conversation with my dad (the source of wisdom itself, occasionally…) that I named what I’d been feeling the past few days: despair.
Yet it wasn’t my despair. What I mean was, I didn’t FEEL sad. I also didn’t have anything specific to feel sad about (aside from racial injustice, a global health pandemic, extreme poverty, the election, climate change…).
Yet these things have been around for months, if not centuries. My sadness was new.
In her podcast, Becca articulates my experience of intimately feeling something I don’t understand — something that isn’t mine, but still affects me deeply. She shares:
“I don’t like the phrase ‘crying for no reason.’ What it really means is crying for a reason you can’t articulate. But when we’re sensitive, all of our feelings are for an actual reason. It’s just usually for a reason that’s not in the physical plain, so it’s harder to identify.”
I spent so much of my life thinking there was something wrong with me — that I was too sensitive, too high maintenance, or plain nuts. I had so many needs and feelings that others couldn’t see, and that I couldn’t explain.
To name a feeling — to acknowledge and validate your experience — is to create space for healing.
I’ll save my journey of making friends with my sensitivity for another post (hint: Becca had a heck of a lot to do with it). Simply put, it changed my life.
A rose by any other name
On Friday, roaming around Cole Valley while talking to my father, I finally named what i’d been feeling.
Instantly, its control loosened.
I wasn’t ready to giggle, or revert to my healthy pre-COVID diet, or even write. But I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. Honestly, I felt a bit more sane.
To name a feeling — to acknowledge and validate your experience — is to create space for healing.
(Before you write this off as hippie energy stuff, hear me out.)
I’m extremely lucky to be employed, healthy and able to work from a safe and comfortable home. I’m also lucky to be white, in a society built for whiteness.
AND the past few months have been hard. All encompassingly, overwhelmingly hard.
Having the courage to name my despair bought me freedom.
It created a container to heal.
As Susan David notes in her Harvard Business Review article:
“When people don’t acknowledge and address their emotions, they display lower wellbeing and more physical symptoms of stress, like headaches. There is a high cost to avoiding our feelings. On the flip side, having the right vocabulary allows us to see the real issue at hand — to take a messy experience, understand it more clearly, and build a roadmap to address the problem.”
When we name a feeling it shrinks to the size we allow for it.
Before naming, it can feel limitless and overwhelming. After, it doesn’t go away, but the container suddenly has a shape, and a size.
For example, knowing I was managing a sort of communal, global despair helped me take care of myself. I went on two hikes, rather than continuing to play Settlers of Catan on my couch (my solution to most problems). I read in Golden Gate park. I attempted to bake. I even searched the internet for a hypoallergenic kitten (lifelong gratitude for any leads!).
The feeling didn’t go away immediately, but by acknowledging what I was going through, I could take care of myself — time in nature, rest, and seeking out joyful things (KITTENS).
Before I validated my experience, I felt shitty. I just didn’t know why.
Result? I couldn’t take care of myself.
What’s that thing i’m feeling?
So why was it so hard for me to name my feelings?
Two reasons, among many:
First, feelings can hurt. There’s a reason emotional numbing tools like alcohol, cigarettes/marijuana and, frankly, Netflix are some of the biggest industries in this country.
When we stop to actually look at our feelings, we feel them. Completely. And they’re not always comfortable, especially when every way we turn is ripe with crisis and pain.
Secondly, once we name a feeling, we have to make a decision. We can no longer carry on as we were — we must decide how to act (and no action is also a decision), which can lead to other challenging and uncomfortable things.
Ok, well that sounds horrible. So why yes?
Simply? Because we are human beings. Because of all the reasons I shared above. And because of this:
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Rumi
