our function is to feel
This essay is one piece of a multi-part series entitled THREAT.
I believe that the threat that we pose to this country, to this system, to colonialist and capitalist structures is remembering. As I write through these pieces and parts, I will set forth what it is I believe we must remember and why it necessary we all be willing, in some way, shape or form, to assume the position and responsibility of being a threat.
_
june 14, 2026
Towards the end of my time with my first therapist in adulthood, I started to do what is referred to as “numbing out”. In one of our last sessions together I was asked what I was feeling. I said I was feeling more than I knew what to do with, more than I felt I had the capacity to handle. As I spoke, there were no tears, there wasn’t even frustration. As a deeply sensitive and expressive person, this reluctance to show emotion was evidence of the numbing.
Even as I was numbing on the surface, beneath the surface, the emotions were moving like tidal waves. As I tried to find my way to the ‘why’ of my difficulty in accessing what is usually so accessible to me, my therapist said something that opened me.
She said the point is never to choose either the head (mind) or the heart. The point is to find their meeting place. She asked me to think about where in my body my mind and heart meet. I closed my eyes and searched for it. Almost immediately I felt my chest compress and I started to heave. With minutes left in the session, the emotions moving beneath the surface released in a torrent of tears. [click here to read more or listen to the audio]
I come back to the memory of this session often. More often recently as I watch and notice myself and others from the inside out, and outside in, struggling under the weight of unexpressed, unfelt, unnamed, misnamed, and misdirected emotions.
I want to make note of the difference between feeling and emotion. My current understanding is that emotions are the body’s physical response to stimuli. Emotions are the physical sensations like the tightening of the chest, shallow breathing, racing heartbeat, sweaty palms etc. Feelings are how we interpret these physical sensations, often said to be the “stories” we tell ourselves about the emotions. These stories are usually shaped by our personal experiences, and also experiences we have inherited (known in psychology as intergenerational trauma).
When we first arrive to this world, we are without verbal language. We communicate through expression and sound and we learn our environments through sensation. The example I always give is how we learn that something is hot or cold. Yes, we can tell a child not to touch something, because it is hot, sharp, dangerous, but that child does not understand what hot is and why hot things should not be touched until it experiences the sensation of singed skin.
Our function is to feel, which is to sense, so that we may learn this world through the experience of it.
Our function is to feel so that we may move and be moved.
Sometimes this movement will show up as interruption or disruption and this -ruption compels us to act, to think, to speak, to create, to comfort, to connect, to care, to change, to shift, to question, to expand.
Writing for me always starts with a nudge, usually in the form of a sensation and usually the sensation is a kind of question. Then a conversation ensues and this begins the process of doing language. Sometimes the language is written - journaling, random written notes, internal ponderings and talking to myself. Sometimes the talking happens in my dreams. In these dreams I am usually in conversation with a woman. In one of my recent dreams I was asking her, somewhat pleading, deeply frustrated, needing an answer.
“How do I carry all of this? This grief, this anger, this sadness, this heart ache?”
The woman answered, “You are not being asked to carry it. You are being asked to feel it. If it feels foreign, unwelcome, confusing, strange, alarming, invite it in, be curious, hold its hand, sit beside it, examine it so you can SEE it.”
In recent moments as I stumble my way through life transitions, and almost everything feeling uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and as I am grieving and my heart is mending, I consider the potential ease of numbing, of ignoring, isolating, shutting down, and off my ability to sense, and feel. But then there is a whisper, a remembering that it is the ability to sense and feel that confirms apathy has not won. It is this ability that compels us, changes us, expands and transforms us.
Our ability to feel and sense allows us to open and see beyond ourselves and our personal and privileged experience…
_
Thank you for reading and listening.
Stay tuned for part two.