feeling feelings > thinking feelings

I swung between extremes of detachment and overwhelm. Now, I’m aiming for the center of the softness spectrum 🏹

Minutes into our first meeting, I was bawling. She’d flown in from L.A., and we had planned to discuss collaborating, but we never got to that part. Instead, she shared the painful end of her five-year relationship and moving alone to Santa Fe. I cried—not for her, but for myself. My breakup was fresh, and my emotions had finally caught up to me. It didn’t matter that she was a stranger or that we were in the middle of the Ludlow Hotel lobby. Soon, she was comforting me.

Five years earlier, I sat across from another woman I’d just met, a therapist, lamenting that I hadn’t cried in years. I’d sought her out believing I had vaginismus—painful sex—but she saw my struggles differently.

"You’re very cerebral," she said. "You think your feelings in your head rather than feel them in your body."

She was right. It started with food when I was a kid, denying my cravings and manipulating my size. I numbed my hunger in pursuit of thinness. Restriction became my skill, discipline my differentiator, and the smaller I got, the more seen I felt. But being so rigid meant I was easy to break.

She said the body would be my guide for learning to emote. The only problem was I’d become a master at ignoring mine.

Physically, I was hard. My stomach was flat. I could touch my stiff ribs through my clothes, and tiny bones pointed out of my shoulders. But being so rigid meant I was easy to break. I grasped onto my unnaturally small size as an identity, but finally at 25, I started noticing all I was missing out on to maintain it. I wanted to inhabit my body so I finally committed to nourishing it. Soon my shape softened, but the emotional shell would be difficult to break.

“Growing up when I cried, I was met with, 'Stop it, come on, you're okay,'" I told my therapist as she dug into my childhood.

But I wasn’t okay, I was expressing intense sensations for the first time, and this was how I learned to suppress them... My mom was a master at wearing masks that told the world that everything was fine. So I learned to hold things in, too. My family wasn’t unique; in a society where it’s a privilege to emote, my mom couldn’t afford the luxury of breaking down. She had to get through the workday and raise a kid on her own. She learned it from her mom, who took care of six, mostly alone.

When my tears weren’t validated, my unnaturally small size was. It gave me the attention I so craved, I didn’t care that I had to trade my sanity and relationships—the praise was worth it.

But the high from under-eating was fleeting. It left me hungry not only for food but for affection and connection. As I let myself get softer on the outside, I hoped the work I was doing with this therapist would soften me on the inside.

Soon into our work together, I fell into a relationship. My sharp edges began to soften more each month. I’d been preoccupied for so long by eating as little as I could and exercising as much as possible, that I didn’t know how to live. My new boyfriend showed me a window into a life of physical sensation. With him, I had my first old fashion, oyster, and orgasm. After years of being a militant and sober raw vegan who went to bed before the sun went down, this was the height of hedonism.

My period returned after a decade absence due to chronic dieting. I was having regular, pain-free sex. I was more embodied than I’d been in years, feeling emotion physically, getting butterflies when he told me he loved me with the sheets pulled over his face or heart flutters when I read his texts. When he told me one night lying in his bed in Detroit, “You check boxes for me that I didn’t even know I had,” my eyes welled up…almost.

Unlike me, he teared up at movies and podcasts.