how to debug your feelings

field notes from a working, breathing lab

Before we get into today’s essay, one thing. I’m launching a series where you send the question you’ve been avoiding, and I answer it on video with honesty and a little heat. Nothing is too strange. Nothing is too personal.
Love, loss, reinvention, fear, desire. If it’s been circling you, I want to hear it.

Now, back to today’s thought…

how to debug your feelings

'‘I don’t want to be nicer. I want to be accurate. I don’t want to be governed by an echo of ‘a thing that happened once.’ I want to sharpen my discernment. Is this sensation from now or from then? Is this a threat or a memory? Is this intuition, or is my nervous system replaying a scene I (barely) survived and never metabolised? Is my heart racing from fear or from the truth?”

It took me a long time to realise that most of my feelings are the body speaking in disguise, sensation flaring while intellect hurries behind it, desperate to take credit. For years, you can believe you are behaving rationally. What if, instead, you are running on skewed memory, adrenaline, and a collection of internal alarms you mistake for intelligence, for logic?

Ever get the feeling you have to have it all pulled together? I learned from the best. I was raised by a Jamaican grandmother who preened in front of the mirror. She had everything handled. We were well kept, well fed. You knew what she felt, only when she decided you were allowed to know. Our family had a history of scrubbing up well, until we didn’t. Until we fell apart. Fell away.

Now, I get exhausted by having to show up composed when nothing calm is happening under my skin. After years of acting, there’s too much of a cost. We are praised for being disconnected from ourselves in ways that entertain or benefit others. Emotional literacy wasn’t part of the curriculum growing up, and many parents and caregivers did not know how to lead by example. No, instead we were taught to endure, to codeswitch, to stay externally coherent while unravelling on the inside, to seduce, to charm, to shut the hell up and try to stay on top, whatever it took from us, however much of the self was erased in the process.

Until quite recently, I didn’t understand why I wanted to run screaming from social events, even when nothing bad was happening, and why socialising does me in, leaves me not wanting to do anything else for the rest of the week. Well, the body is older than the lie, and not taken in by yer excuses. It communicates in subtler languages, but a known language all the same…a tight jaw, stomach problems, myriad silent poisons.