Delayed Emotions
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Your job is all about being open emotionally, being vulnerable, so I don’t understand why you can’t be vulnerable right now.
I understand the pain of it. Like I’m withholding, choosing not to be open.
But it’s not a reluctance. It’s a delay. I need time to figure out how I’m feeling. I always have.
None of my work happens in real time. It never has. It always happens in retrospect. Because the truth of it is, my capacity for emotion, my understanding of emotions may be vast, but my processing speed is slow. It takes me time to understand. I’m not sure anyone’s ever fully gotten that.
Because in the moment I get so overwhelmed by it all. By my emotions, by yours, by how they interact with each other. And sometimes, in the moment, it’s hard for me to decipher what my emotions are trying to tell me. Understanding won’t come until some time has passed, and I’ve written, parsed out what happened. This is how I process. Not in the moment. It’s as if my emotional system goes into overdrive and shuts down in the most intense moments.
So, when you see me perform a poem, or find a video of me talking about something complex, and you think to yourself that I’m emotionally locked in, it’s not always true. I’m a human being. When you see the poem, understand the depth, consider what’s being said, please know that it doesn’t just happen. I have to work at it. I have to sit down and look at my emotions to understand them. It doesn’t just happen. It isn’t perfect.
You see the outcome of the work. But the work itself is making time to prioritise understanding my emotions. Which, ultimately, is surprising to anyone who finds themselves in my life. Because there’s an expectation that I will always be emotionally on the mark. And I won’t be, not until I have time to process, to write, to explain back to myself what emotions I’m feeling, and why I’m feeling them.