Emotions Concealed

Where have I been? Traveling the small perimeter of my world between working at a midtown, small Catholic university, driving to the Western suburb which holds my new office, to the Eastern edges of Minneapolis where my older daughters live with their loved ones. I am traveling, traveling, traveling way too much. And now, now I am trying to slow down and hear my own heart beating, so I can follow the rhythm it is beating out. 

I have been immersed in education, completing two graduate degrees, and forcing myself to regurgitate knowledge I already have in a doctoral program, pretending to be learning, so as not to seem too proud. Hoping to retain a position in the precarious state that the university is in. For all of that, I’ve been told that I won’t be offered a contract after the end of May. Restructuring. 

Most of my friends and loved ones have seen that I’ve been way too busy, and have urged me to slow down. I’ve replied that I’m waiting on the universe to move me. And so now, it has. I have to trust that all that I’ve built has not been built on sand, or if it has, it is ok that the ocean will pull it back into the sea. 

I have to trust the sand, and the stars, and the wind, and the clouds, and find myself back a child of the universe who belongs, no matter my credentials or bank account. I have been chasing and chasing away the ideology of success and belonging, wanting to belong, not wanting to personify difference, wanting wisdom, not a degree. Wanting resources, not to build walls, but to feel safe and to create. To create a place where all of us belong. 

I am sitting with my own not belonging (shame) to creating my own belonging, and in this place of my own belonging, a space where all of us, and all of our emotions have enough space. We have a conundrum of having created shame around even having emotions at all. We are born with emotional competence, which our shame based culture devalues almost immediately after birth. 

Reading this this morning, (listening to Julie London sing Sway): 

The relation between social bonds and emotion was developed by Helen Lewis (1977). In her analysis of infant-caretaker relations and adult relations in modern societies, she made explicit what was implied by Cooley and Goffman; that shame and threats to the social bond are interdependent aspects of the same reality. Shame is the emotional aspect of disconnection between persons. 

Lewis proposed that there is a universal human nature, one that unites biology and culture. She suggested that studies in infant development have demonstrated a biological initiation of social competence. (From Scheff & Retzinger’s Emotions and Violence, 1991.)