One of the questions I find hardest to answer is, “How do you feel about that?”
It sounds like a simple question, yet there have been many moments in my life when I have found myself genuinely unsure of the answer. While other people seem to arrive naturally at an emotional response, I often find myself sitting with uncertainty, trying to understand what has happened before I know how I feel about it.
I notice this most when someone shares news that appears to come with an expected emotional reaction. A friend announces that they are moving across the country for a new opportunity and the room immediately fills with congratulations. While others seem to arrive naturally at excitement, I often find myself becoming curious. I wonder what led to the decision, what they are hoping for, what they are leaving behind and how they feel about the change themselves. Before I know how I feel about the news, I need to understand what it means to the person living it.
The same thing can happen when someone shares difficult news. A person loses a job, a relationship ends, someone receives a diagnosis or a long-held plan falls apart. The emotional tone is often established almost immediately, as though everyone instinctively knows how they should feel about it. Yet I find myself asking questions. What does this actually mean for them? How are they experiencing it? What happens next? The older I get, the more I realize that very few life experiences fit neatly into categories of good or bad. Things that appear exciting can contain grief or things that appear painful can contain relief; most meaningful life events seem to hold more than one truth at the same time.
Over the years, I have come to realize that when I am struggling to identify my feelings, I am searching for meaning; I need context before emotion. I need to understand the landscape before I can locate myself within it. While others may experience an immediate emotional response, my feelings often emerge through a process of understanding. As I gather information, reflect and begin to make sense of what has happened, my emotional experience gradually becomes clearer.
There is another part of this experience that has taken me much longer to understand. Sometimes I don’t know how I feel because I haven’t yet figured out what all the possibilities are. When someone asks me how I feel about a situation, I can usually sense that something is happening internally, but it feels undefined. It is as though I am aware of movement beneath the surface, yet I do not have the words for it; the feeling exists before the language does.
When I first learned about alexithymia, something about this experience finally made sense. Alexithymia is described as difficulty identifying and naming emotions. Many people assume it means an absence of feelings, when in reality it can feel more like a delay between experiencing an emotion and understanding what that emotion is. Looking back, I began to recognize how often I had mistaken uncertainty for a lack of feeling. In reality, there was usually something there all along, I just needed more time to understand it. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/alexithymia
I can recognize this process in hindsight. An interaction stays with me longer than expected, a conversation continues to replay in my mind, or I find myself returning to a particular situation long after it has passed. Over time, the picture begins to come into focus and I realize that I was hurt, disappointed, worried, grieving, or feeling something I had not yet been able to name. The emotion was present long before I understood it. What arrived later was the clarity that allowed me to recognize it and put language to an emotion I experienced all along.
This becomes more complicated when social expectations enter the picture. When everyone around me appears excited, upset, angry, or relieved, it can feel as though there is an emotional conclusion that has already been reached and I am somehow still gathering information. For a long time, I wondered whether I was missing something. I wondered whether other people possessed a kind of emotional certainty that seemed inaccessible to me.
Now I think it may just be that people arrive at emotions through different pathways. For some people, feelings seem to emerge immediately and understanding follows. For others, understanding creates the conditions for feelings to become clear. I have come to realize that I fall into the second group. Before I know how I feel, I usually need to understand what something means to me, to the people involved and to the larger story unfolding around it.
In a world that often values quick reactions and immediate certainty, there can be pressure to know exactly how we feel right away. Over time, I have become more comfortable with the answer, “I don’t know yet.” Some experiences reveal their meaning slowly. They ask us to live with the questions for a while, to gather context, to reflect, and to allow our understanding to deepen before our emotions come fully into focus.