It's not the feelings that are hard

On using your feelings as information, and the alphabet no one taught us.

It’s Friday morning. I’m holding my phone in the gap between two things — between the school run and the desk, between making the tea and drinking it, the kind of pause that doesn’t qualify as a break but is the closest thing on offer.

A headline scrolls past. A podcast episode, I think. It says: stop fighting your feelings. Use them as information.

I close the app. The frustration that rises is immediate and disproportionate, the kind that tells me the headline has touched something I’d been trying to name and failing.

Use them as information.

In what language? Translated by whom? Read against what baseline? Sorted into which categories? Compared with whose? Triangulated against which prior data points? Weighted by what — context, hormonal cycle, sleep, last week’s argument, the slow accumulation of all the things I haven’t said?

The headline assumes the difficult part is permission. That somewhere a woman is fighting her feelings, refusing to feel them, and what she needs is to be told they are useful. That if she’ll only stop resisting, the data will deliver itself, legibly, and she’ll know what to do.

My experience runs the other way. I’m drowning in data. Felt data, arriving constantly, much of it contradictory, none of it labelled. The fight, if there is one, is with the absence of any apparatus for reading what I’m feeling, and with the suspicion that I’m supposed to have built that apparatus myself, alone, in my spare time, between everything else.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being told the answer is inside you while no one shows you how to find it.

The wellness register has taken this on as its territory and made it sound like care. Listen to your body. Trust your gut. Your feelings are valid. Your feelings are information. The phrases land warmly. They sound like the opposite of being dismissed. And in one sense they are. The older instruction, the one most women received first, was to ignore the data entirely. To get on with it. To not be hysterical.

So I notice I’m supposed to be grateful that the instruction has flipped. That the feelings are now permitted, even encouraged, even cast as wisdom. But the new instruction has the same architecture as the old one. It hands the entire interpretive task back to the woman and stops talking.

Trust your gut. About what. Trust it how. Trust it when it’s wrong. Trust it against the gut of the person standing opposite you, who is also trusting his, and arriving at the opposite conclusion. Trust it when it’s the product of conditioning you cannot see. Trust it when it’s the residue of a younger you. Trust it when it’s the right answer. Trust it when it isn’t.

What’s missing is method. The slow apprenticeship of learning what a particular feeling tends to mean for you, in what kind of context, when arriving in what kind of body. The years of attention required to tell the difference between fear and intuition, between resentment and exhaustion, between the loneliness that wants company and the loneliness that wants to be left alone.

That apprenticeship is the work. That apprenticeship is what no one teaches.

Therapy can help, for some, for a while, if you can afford it and find the right one. Books can help, in pieces. Other women can help, when there’s time, which there isn’t. But the cultural conversation about feelings has skipped the apprenticeship and gone straight to the slogans, as if the only thing standing between a woman and self-knowledge is the right caption on a graphic.

I want to be careful here, because I’m aware this can read as bitter. The truer word is tired. I’m tired of being handed data with no schema, of being told the data is wisdom when it’s in fact raw, and of being made responsible for refining it on my own.

The implication of the slogan is that competence is somewhere inside me, already, waiting to be permitted. That I just need to stop fighting it. That the absence of insight is a kind of refusal.

What if it’s actually the absence of language. What if I’ve been doing the harder version of this work for a long time, with the tools available, and the reason I can’t always interpret what I feel is that I’ve never been given the vocabulary it would take to read it.

That is a different shape of problem. The first is about effort. The second is about absence. The headline assumes the first. Most of my actual life is the second.

There was a feeling I’d been carrying that morning, when the headline appeared. I’m not going to name it, because the specific feeling isn’t the point and because part of what I have to say is that I don’t entirely have the words for it. That’s exactly the thing. I was looking, in a half-attentive way, for some piece of language that would help. What I got was an instruction to use the feeling as information, when the feeling was already information I couldn’t read.

I closed the app. I drank the tea, by then half cold.

I want a culture that takes the apprenticeship seriously. One that treats the interpretation of felt experience as a skill that takes years to build, in community, with help, with vocabulary that’s been developed and tested and handed down. I don’t have that culture. Most women I know don’t have that culture. We’re working with what we have, which is largely scraps and slogans, and the suspicion that the failure to make sense of our own feelings is a personal one.

It isn’t a personal one.

Naming that is the start of clearing the ground. The apprenticeship is everything that comes after. I’m not yet sure what gets built on the cleared ground, or whether I’ll live long enough to find out.