We Are in the Business of Feelings

Embracing Emotionality in Writing and Life

“Most of the poets I know aren’t actually vulnerable people,” my friend noted, laughing over the phone. I was relaying my shock to him after my new therapist roasted me for being disconnected from my feelings. I’m a poet! I said. Vulnerability is my thing! Three years ago, much of my identity was centered around being emotionally-attuned, able to name when I’m frustrated, sad, or envious; understanding of other people’s emotions and able to help them move through them.

 So when my therapist observed that I haven’t been talking in detail about how I’ve felt in my relationships, or what’s been running through my mind with work, I was taken aback. But the more I thought about it—poetry and astrological water placements aside—my therapist and my friend were both right. I had noticed that my relationships hadn’t been as satisfying, my conversations less intimate and revealing than they once were. What happened?

Not only had I been physically isolated from the difficulty of the pandemic at its onset, I also found myself emotionally isolated from a government and society desperate to “return to normal,” leaving sick and disabled folks behind. I felt alone as others around me looked forward in an effort to forget, while I struggled to keep myself safe. To cope, I turned to writing: I poured my heart into my poetry and often kept it rigid with my friends and partners. I translated trauma into art, but, ironically, doing so solidified the object, making it almost impossible to deconstruct.

How many of us have turned to writing to make sense of chaos? Still, though writing is personal, there is pressure to dismiss the personal in literary work, lest it be read as sentimental.

How can we reinsert emotion back into our writing practice, without shame? How can we practice vulnerability as we brave the page? How might leaning more into emotional honesty and sincerity in our daily lives affect our writing?

In workshop, we speak technically about speakers and voltas, affect and motive. I try to keep a straight face while explaining gender dysphoria and abuse that I’ve rendered as image and music to reclaim and make sense of. Surely, I utilize speakers as a way to isolate ideas in the container of the poem and explore an idea more closely, but those are undoubtedly aspects of my experiences, magnified and extrapolated.

Lucille Clifton. Photo by Mark Lennihan.

To be sure, there is often use in creating some distance between the writer and the poem, and it is useful to analyze work objectively in order to identify its strengths. Such technical language can serve as a common point of discussion. But it also encourages sterility and a level of pretense, and we have to know how to reinsert emotionality– that is, the outward expression of the internal experience of emotion. As much as writers disavow having any relation to our characters or speakers, our writing shows part of our lives, if not what we lived directly (often the case in fiction and many poems), then concepts we’ve been thinking about, fascinations we’ve had. Writing is a practice of vulnerability because it requires, and shows, acrobatics of the mind.

We have to be honest with ourselves about the personal investment in our work, whether it’s a poem detailing the complications of family, or an experimental oeuvre about aliens.

There is an expectation that we should intellectualize something that begins, really, in the heart. Personally, the work that I’m attracted to is not only deftly written, but it’s stirring, it elicits a somatic response; it encourages me to imagine interiority in a new way. In fact, obsession with rationality and objectivity is a construct of white supremacy that prioritizes a single version of what kind of knowledge is valuable.

Toni Cade Bambara. Photo by Susan J. Ross.

Writing is an intimate and highly emotive practice. How many of us have turned to writing because it’s the only place we felt comfortable expressing ourselves? Most writers I know have shared the experience of having few friends but many books as a child. Books have saved my life, pulled me back from the cliff time and time again. Toni Cade Bambara’s work bandaged my gashes. Lucille Clifton showed me where to drink. Some of the poems I’m most proud of have been the most difficult to write, because they have asked me to be brave when making them.

Our lives suffer when we pretend we don’t have deep emotions. Without letting ourselves be known, our relationships grow unfulfilling and we become distanced from our realities. By extension, the writing practice is hard to enter with honesty. People come to reading because they want to feel and consider; they enter writing to question, process, and explore. We are in the business of feelings. It’s time we own it.

Prompts to encourage vulnerability in your life and writing practice:

• Find an old draft that you were excited about, but too scared to finish. Read and/or send it to someone you trust.

• What’s a piece of writing you’ve read recently that elicits a strong emotional response from you (whether pleasant or unpleasant)? Reflect: what about it makes you feel that way? 

• What is a conversation you’ve been meaning to have? Give yourself a week and have it. Afterwards, write a poem or fiction piece that centers the theme of discomfort.

Featured image: The Poet Chatterton by John Joseph Barker