I was telling someone the other day about something that happened to me in college, and as I was telling it, I realized I had distorted the facts. Not intentionally, of course. What I recounted was my emotional experience of the event rather than what actually happened. To this day, I still don’t know what actually happened and probably never will.
Here’s what I know: In my senior year of college, the guy I was seeing flew to London over spring break and hung out with a girl he had a crush on from middle school. Here’s how I experienced it: My boyfriend went to London and cheated on me with a hot girl.
Was he my boyfriend? Did he cheat? Even though we never labeled our relationship, and I don’t know what exactly happened in London, the fact that he and I were seeing each other every week for seven months; the fact that he went to London to meet up with her without once mentioning her to me; the fact that I found out when I opened Facebook and saw pictures of them posing like a couple in front of Buckingham Palace (he wore a cream cardigan that matched her dress (I had never seen it before (it looked so new it probably still had the tag))), making silly faces on the London Eye, and looking wasted while clubbing—certainly smacked of deception.
Seems like a strange time to invoke Tim O’Brien, but I promise there’s a point.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
O’Brien’s central thesis is that trauma has a tendency to create its own reality. The Things They Carried is shelved as fiction, but that doesn’t make it any less true than a memoir about the Vietnam War. It contains the emotional truth of what happened as experienced by someone on the ground. (Side note: O’Brien is able to make this argument because he was upfront about the fictitiousness of his stories.)
Last week, I was in San Francisco, and my coworker told me about checking into her hotel room and finding gnats jumping out of the carpet and onto her ankle. Suddenly, my perception of my own experience of the hotel plummeted from a “7” to a “3,” even though I didn’t find gnats in my room. I adopted my coworker’s emotional experience as my own. It’s the same mechanism at work when we find ourselves engrossed in a book or a movie. Our emotional boundaries are porous. We are atoms ping ponging off each other, exchanging electrons.
I used to admire people who could conceal their feelings. They seemed very self-aware and mature. But I think people who wear their emotions on their sleeves are generally easier to trust than those who never seem to get upset. Emotional signaling is important. It helps us read each other better, helps us help each other better, helps us become better friends, partners, and parents.
Some people struggle to access their emotions. If you ask them how they feel about a situation, they will think about it and come up with a reasonable, “mature” response. They’ve rationalized their way to a “correct” feeling without actually tapping into their emotional truth. Maybe at some point they learned to be ashamed of their ugly feelings.
I keep thinking about this tweet from Trâm:
The more we repress our childlike feelings, the less we’re able to connect with those same emotions in others. Anyone can demonstrate empathy by saying the right words. But true empathy is knowing intimately how the other person feels because you’ve felt it yourself, and you know it’s O.K. to feel that way.
The opposite—indulging in these feelings, for example, by acting out—is also neglecting your inner child. When you do this, you are putting the burden of caretaker on others. Listening to your ugly feelings without letting them hijack your nervous system is a lifelong practice.
I don’t typically experience intense jealousy or anger or resentment. All the more reason to sit with them when they do show up, to greet them like old friends. All they want is to be able to hang out for a while without judgement, without restraint.