five feelings I have learned never to act on

loving your feelings without doing what they tell you. plus, a thought on Lindy West and 13 things that made me smile this week including important gopher news

image source here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/george-frederic-watts-hope-r1105604 - don’t listen to hopelessness

Slightly unintentionally, this is now part of a series I am writing on emotional life and therapy-related stuff. Here is a post I wrote on how to stop asking people to fulfil emotional needs for you when they just don’t have that item in stock. And here’s one on how to work out what your emotional needs are anyway.

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On Friday I interviewed Edith Hall the brilliant Professor of Classics for a Human Intelligence programme about Homer. She has also had the terrible illness I’m just getting over and told me that it’s called flu K – it’s something that has evaded the vaccination so even if you got vaccinated¹, you’re still not immune to it. I am still waking up with a sore throat and still have blocked ears. We were also talking about how this illness makes you feel very glum. Everyone I know who’s had it seems to be having that same experience, that it really gives you the Big Sad. It is very much the Cold Of Despair.

I was thinking about how I know that this feeling is in fact just a feeling. It will pass. It’s not something that I need to give any cognitive or intellectual energy to solve. It is probably a bit helpful that it’s the same feeling that comes every single month precisely three days before my period. One day of feeling like my whole life has been a waste of time and all my decisions have been wrong. It was only maybe in my 30s that I noticed that this feeling comes along every single month. And that it definitely doesn’t have to be resolved or acted on, but it can just be felt in almost an affectionate way, like a glum relative who you still love. They turn up at your house and tell you everything that is wrong, but you know that that’s just what they’re like and they’re still very loving and kind.

In fact, framing feelings as a person or a character is part of Internal Family Systems therapy, which I’ll get to at the end but this is to say – I think it’s very helpful. Your feelings are not your enemy. But that doesn’t mean you have to do what they’re telling you.

So I was thinking about what other feelings I’ve learned over the years that I can just treat with affection without having to ever actually act on them or take them seriously.

1. that’s too good for me

This is a feeling that I remember having as a young woman when I saw a pair of wonderful trousers in a shop that were white with red roses painted on them. I was living in Manhattan at the time and I just started therapy, and it was a real revelation to me to even notice the voice inside my head saying “those are too good for you”. I bought them on the basis that this feeling seemed like one I had to learn to I ignore if I was going to get the life that I wanted.

I still have to notice it and deliberately decide not to act on it; it’s the same voice that tells me not to email back exciting interesting people who have got in touch with me about having a meeting or working on a cool project together. I could go into lots of detail about where this type of voice comes from inside me, but I think the important thing is maybe not “where does this come from?” but “how do I have a peaceful relationship with this voice?”

I try to be very humorous and understanding with it, not combative at all and not arguing back. I don’t say “you’re wrong!”, I say something more like “well let’s see what happens”. What happens if I buy the trousers with the red roses on them? What happens if I respond to an offer of friendship from an interesting and/or well-known person? What happens if I send off this application or send the message that I have the impulse to send? Then I can just be curious which is a far happier place for me mentally than battling. (I still have the trousers. They’re great.)

2. I’m not supposed to say that

I’m very good at this one actually. And have been for years. Whenever I feel I’m not supposed to say something, I know that I must therefore say it at once. I don’t mean shouting horrible words at a stranger obviously. But if I feel that there is something that everyone is avoiding pointing out, or something which seems true but which you’ll get a lot of social disapproval for saying, I think those are the things you have to say. This was how I ended up writing my first novel Disobedience. It was because I had seen firsthand how badly my community was treating LGBT+ people, I felt someone had to say something and since no one was saying anything, it was down to me. This is the message of the Emperor’s New Clothes story. But just because it’s an old and well-known story, doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. I will say this: whenever I have said the true important thing that I felt I wasn’t supposed to say it has always won me more friends than it lost me.

3. hopelessness

It’s so easy to feel hopeless, and that is really the seduction of it. When something goes wrong and I am disappointed, there is a very easy feeling to have which is “just surrender to the fact that this will never happen, surrender and stop trying and stop wanting.”

I personally find it very helpful to think of all of these feelings as being essentially ways that I am trying to love and care for myself. A way that parts of my self are trying to care for myself. Hopelessness is really trying to help by encouraging me not to keep on trying at something which is impossible.

But it’s also a bit of a drama queen, this feeling. It’s different to a pragmatic assessment of what might work and what really won’t work. I can pragmatically assess the fact that – really – I once had 12 ice-skating lessons after which I could only just about gingerly walk around the edge of the ice rink with my hand hovering over the rail. The pragmatic assessment there is that unless I want to put months and months of my life into learning to ice skate, this isn’t the lifetime in which I’m going to be doing it. But a pragmatic assessment is different to hopelessness. Hopelessness feels flouncy and dramatic. It’s got a shouty air to it: yelling in my face: “don’t you see?! this will never work!” That’s the feeling not to act on. Hopelessness is the feeling that comes along when you really really want something so much that that part of you is trying to protect you by making you give up. And you can just ruffle its hair and go, “ah hopelessness, here you are again, I see that what you mean by being here is that you can tell I want something very much.”

4. cringing cowardice

This is really one that I’ve been thinking a lot about this week and it’s almost brand-new, hot off the presses of my mind to really work out what feeling it is. I have regretted whenever I listened to it. “Cringing cowardice” is a very harsh name for it, I realise, but I’m just getting to know it.

When I was a young woman, I sent off for the brochure for the MA in creative writing at UEA for four years in a row without applying. The idea of showing my work to anyone made me cringe with horror. What if they didn’t like it? I really had the feeling that it would not be possible to survive it. I remember imagining that if I sent my work in, then people at the university would crowd around the academic’s desk and all point and laugh at my bad writing. I really did imagine that!

The thing that moved me on from it was genuinely: revelation of mortality. I was living in Manhattan on 9/11. I watched the towers falling from my office window. I thought to myself: I bet there were people in those buildings today thinking what I was thinking which was “I’ll just do this job for another few years and then I’ll write that novel I always meant to write”. So I was impelled to push past the cringing cowardly feeling by an understanding that none of us has unlimited time. The feeling was: I would rather die trying at this than live not trying. I told you some of these feelings are very dramatic! But the cringing cowardly feeling didn’t go away. Even when I got called in for interview there was a part of me that was thinking that maybe they were just calling me in to laugh at the person who had written this shockingly bad work.

The feeling is not a cool assessment of the situation. Not a “hmm, I think this isn’t going to work” or “there is a lot to do to get this right”. It is a voice inside me saying in a panicky way “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” It hyperventilates and cringes away and says “don’t make me try that”.

It’s a piece of new understanding for me that I must not listen to this feeling. I’ve never had the cringing cowardly feeling about something that I didn’t really want. Not-wanting is a completely different feeling. Every time I have listened to the cringing cowardly feeling it has made me wait to do something which eventually I ALWAYS DO because it’s something that I really want. And every time when I have eventually done it, it has come with challenges and setbacks, but those challenges and setbacks are better than not getting started.

I wonder whether the other people have this experience, or just me?

5. I can’t do without that person

Like everyone I have been following this Lindy West story. For context: she’s a brilliant feminist writer who has just published a book which seems to be about how her husband persuaded her into polyamory even though she basically wanted to be monogamous.

This is from Meg Keene’s post:

2011: As West’s dad is dying, Oluo dumps her. 2012: West’s dad dies, Oluo shows up to help, he says that they can get back together on the condition that they are non monogamous, something West doesn’t want and is heartbroken about. But she wants her boyfriend back so she agrees.

This piece is a lot more positive about what’s going on although it does also contain this from her friend (the very funny writer) Samatha Irby:

Irby doesn’t have as much sympathy for Oluo despite being friends with him too. “I’m still finger-on-the-trigger as soon as she says the word. If she ever tells me it’s not cool, I will get on a plane and help dispose of a body,” she said. “It seems to be going well! But I am ready if she ever calls for me to come chop him into pieces.”

I wish Lindy West nothing but happiness. I don’t know her relationship. Unlike Irby most of us don’t know her at all. So we’re responding to something else, which I think is the feeling she describes.

It made me think and remember: every single time in my life I have felt that I absolutely could not do without a specific other human, that my life would not be worth living if that person wasn’t there, that has always been a lie. And often, it is a lie that is caused by the other person manipulating you.

Under the line, more thoughts about the “I can’t do without that person” feeling, plus thirteen items for the cabinet of delights this week including:

• a very good picture of dogs

• a delicious-smelling soap that strangers have actually complimented me on

• an excellent mind-bending short story

• the best hotel in Manhattan and

• great news about gophers restoring a natural environment.

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