feelings

i am on a walk with a friend, and during a lull in our conversation they ask, “so do you believe in true love?

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for someone who’s deeply invested in movies, i’ve historically been pretty bad at understanding acting. as a kid i was so awful at reading faces and body language that i would often confuse two characters in the same movie if they weren’t obviously distinct in appearance, ie. if they didn’t have different hair styles or skin colors. i continued enjoying movies anyway, and whatever ability i have now to understand acting comes from hundreds of hours of watching movie scenes on youtube and reading other peoples’ analyses in the comments. it worked; at this point i’d say i’m okay at inferring how people are feeling, both onscreen and in-person, but this is something i learned much more slowly than my friends

my parents never taught me what feelings are (is this a thing most children learn from their parents, or does everyone figure this out independently?), and it’s certainly not something they teach you in school, so i probably learned to map feelings to their names through lots of pattern-matching with fiction i read as a kid. if i had to identify each sensation with the first time i can remember experiencing it, it’d look something like this: 

• pain is when you cut your skin on the edge of a brick while trying to pull legos apart
• fear is when you bolt out of a room after turning off the lights
• anger is when someone borrows your pencil and doesn’t give it back
• happiness is when you eat vanilla ice cream
• affection is when you realize you like the people you sit next to for six hours a day at school

a few posts ago i wrote about not being sure of what constitutes severe pain. but the fact that words which attempt to capture the grandiosity of human experience are also used to describe the mundane everyday of an elementary schooler makes me wonder whether any of the words are being applied correctly — have i ever really experienced terror, or only fear? wrath, or simply anger? joy, or just happiness? can i know if i believe in true love or not, when i don’t know whether i’ve felt anything beyond mere affection? 

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in the summer of 2018 i happened to be in the bay area while sparc was running, so i visited and walked in during the middle of an hour-long talk. one of the instructors explained how, in their experience, various kinds of trauma and suppressed emotion manifest as tension or irregularity in their abdomen. supposedly one of their therapists was able to feel around the instructor’s stomach area for bumps, and in doing so help them identify and let go of their feelings

most of that i don’t really believe in, but it is true that the emotions which have taken me longer to discern have also been more distinctly connected with my body. i didn’t have the awareness to feel true loneliness until high school, but now that i know what it is, it manifests as a weight in my chest. i didn’t have the patience to feel real gratitude until this year, but now that i’m familiar with it, i perceive it as fuller breathing motions in my lungs and diaphragm. of course my chest and lungs and diaphragm are not actually changing and all this is only happening in my head, but so was everything the instructor described, and that didn’t make their therapy any less effective. maybe the true point of the stomach-touching exercise is that you have choice over how your feelings are experienced, and when you’re sufficiently aware of your feelings for them to become as tangible as physical sensations, they become much easier to unravel and understand

so do i know if i believe in true love? i can tell you what i do know, and what i said on our walk, which is that love is a feeling where the act of believing in it enables you to experience it more deeply, and so some people who believe in true love probably actually feel it too

but i can also tell you that, for now at least, i am either too cynical or too realist to disentangle any of my love-like experiences — are midnight walks and long hugs and spontaneous calls love? —  from narcissism and self-validation and attempts to fend off loneliness. so in that sense i don’t yet believe in true love, and i therefore do not experience it either