Atlas of the Heart.
I’ve always been pretty moody. And not in the cool brooding teenager way or in the all-black wearing, cigarette-smoking Scorpio way. I guess I come across as pretty bubbly most of the time (at least to people who have not witnessed me hungry or tired or behind on my homework). Still, inside of me (inside of everyone?), there are a lot of feelings buzzing around.
This was especially true when I was a kid. There’s this family photo from when I was four or five: everyone’s smiling around me while I’m grimacing and threatening to tear the teddy bear I’m holding apart. I thought it was a joke I was pulling, but my older sister has told me I used to have this massive temper that would come out of the blue—I’d be fine, I’d be fine, and then I’d be explosive. One of my other sisters will tell you that when we were teenagers, I’d come home after basketball practice smelling terrible and would catch an attitude when she told me to shower. When I did go into the bathroom, I’d be there for hours, the door locked and me on the floor writing in my notebook, makeshifting a room of my own. I was often bubbly but sometimes angry, sometimes sulky, sometimes sad—when I was small enough to fit, I used to sit on the floor of the towel closet with the door shut, soothed by the darkness. If someone opened the door and asked me what was wrong, I’d tell them, “I don’t know.”
I’ve for the most part grown out of being emotionally all over the place—exercising helps, journaling helps, writing, staring out the window, drinking tea. If anything, I’ve learned to express my negative emotions to myself first and then—when I understand them better—present them to other people when I need to. Still, my boyfriend and I have named the person I turn into when I haven’t eaten dinner or when it’s past 11 p.m. And still, I’m very interested in all of the ways a person can feel—the map of our emotions.
Here’s the thing: I, like many people, love Brené Brown. She’s from Texas, but she’s socially aware. She’s brilliant, but she’s down to earth. And—what has made me love her all the more—she knows how to record a good audiobook. She doesn’t just read the text to you, but pauses, rereads parts she really likes, speaks to you in a way that makes sense for listening instead of leaving you to adjust on your own to this text turned audio. She—like this sticker I just bought that I’m obsessed with—seems to understand that “audiobooks are books” and approaches her own audiobooks with a care that feels specific and intentional.
I read her book on vulnerability Daring Greatly a while back and ever since, when I make a mistake or when I can’t keep up, I remember how inevitable this is and how it doesn’t mean something’s wrong with me. That book grew my confidence, and her newer book Atlas of the Heart is both helpful too and fascinating. She breaks down all kinds of emotions and emotion-adjacent concepts that I’d never thought that much about: envy, cognitive dissonance, flooding. One of my favorites that she covers is foreboding joy, which is the idea that after something good happens and you feel excited about it, content maybe, then you fear something bad is going to happen to even things out. She says this isn’t usually the case and it actually cuts our good feeling short and it doesn’t protect us to be so guarded—to not feel like you can share or celebrate good news. She says it’s better to feel grateful when you have that good feeling instead of trying to anticipate how it might be taken away from you. It’s better to be in the moment a bit more.
It’s December now, and everything feels like it’s happening at a fever pitch pace, and as I’m writing this, the sky has been truly gray all day, and I am depending heavily on walks and green tea and my happy lamp to keep me afloat. As I write and as I walk and as I come home and sit in the brilliant light of my makeshift sun, it’s interesting to think about feelings. To think I can feel happy—the way I miraculously do a lot lately despite the gloominess of the season—and I can also feel foreboding joy and also surprise and also disconnection and relief, anger and pride—I don’t know how to say it without sounding cringe but what a wild thing it is to be a human being. It makes me want to take by the shoulders that raging, moody, sometimes sullen, often goofy kid I used to be, show her the beauty of a map.
Image: Brené Brown / Random House
