I find myself wanting to organize my emotions like flatware; disappointment and grief and joy and excitement all in their little separate compartments so I can pick up the ones I want to feel and leave the ones I do not sitting there in the drawer. It does not work, yet for some reason I still want to try. Maybe *this* time it will work, I keep thinking. But it never, ever does.
As an elite-level and experienced emotional avoidance athlete, I am now easily able to construct elaborate scaffolds of ego, shame, distraction, people pleasing, scrolling, overfunctioning, underachieving, overspending, binging, and more. I would never posit that avoiding my feelings is the singular root cause of any of these issues, but what I *am* saying is that ‘feeling it all’ isn’t always my favorite option; and when I DO want to avoid whatever it is I might be feeling, I have many, many coping mechanisms available to help myself do just that.
Suspect #1? Instagram. What makes Instagram the best example of this for me is that it is a strange and terrifying funhouse of weird mirrors; it makes it all too possible for me to live passively and vicariously through the experiences or thoughts of other people (or even worse, through my judgments of them) and somehow I am able to convince myself that I have done something with that time. Let’s take the other day as an example. I wake up, immediately reach for my phone, flick open the app and suddenly I am watching a video of a young woman crying in her car, holding the phone, saying she’d like to ‘share what’s real, and not just the highlights.’ At the end of her heartfelt and verbose caption about feelings: ‘comment ‘_____’ down below to receive more information on my course about feeling it all.’
I don’t know this woman, and I don’t know what she is going through; but I know that in an age branded by the phrase ‘authenticity is king,’ laying in bed casually watching a stranger weeping in her car feels voyeuristic and uncomfortable. I was just sleeping, but now I am suddenly a peeping Tom, looking in the window from the metaphorical back yard on a moment which certainly may have been extremely real for her. Somewhere between the part where she felt the crying jag coming on and the part where she picked up her phone to record it, what was going through her mind? We are all seemingly caught in this labyrinthine maze of capitalistic authenticity. If we are not selling our bodies for labor, we are often selling our inner worlds instead. That video was both a journal entry and an advertisement—a sales pitch for a course, along with being a vulnerable revelation of her inner world. What a complicated intersection of conundrums and dissonances and needs and passions all this is.
Anyway, all that thinking about a stranger’s motivations and psyche first thing in the morning when I never would have encountered her had I just risen from bed and made a coffee and taken some time to think about my day…that’s just one of the expert ways I have of avoiding feeling it all (while also finding a code for an online course about feeling it all.)
I fully recognize and acknowledge the inescapable irony in this. I am here, blogging about feeling it all in the first place, because this is all my very long winded way of telling I have a song out today called … you probably guessed it … ‘Feel It All.’
I save my long-windedness for this platform because it’s an essayist’s platform in the first place, but in light of all this—what am I even going to say on Instagram to promote this one? Should I post a crying in the car video??? Let me know in the comments. 🤣
Hope you enjoy. I started this as a song of affection for a loved one and, as it often goes, found that I needed its message just as much or more. From my heart, I hope it feels like a hand held out to you too.
xoxo
Audrey
PS. as ever, it’s massively helpful if you share this newsletter, my social posts, or just the song in a text to a loved one. To make it simple for you, here’s a link you can copy and paste: https://ffm.to/feelitall
Your support means so much and I do not take it for granted.
*Oops season 4 not 5.
Being an empathetic person, I’d probably be crying along w/ you 😭😢💔💘. I had a rough 2 work days this past week (disappointed my team leader and letting her down bc I didn’t finish my assigned tasks those two days 🥺😢). So after work, I went to the adoration chapel and silently cried 😢😢. Fortunately, the people there didn’t notice my tears 😭. I also teared up 🥲 while watching episode 4 of season 5 of “The Chosen”. A character was mourning the loss of another character. During that scene 🎬, I could feel tears 😢 silently rolling down my cheeks. I feel DEEPLY at times, whether it’s while watching a movie 🎥 or physically being w/ someone who’s crying 😢. Beautiful song 🎶. Congratulations on release day 🎵.