This piece is not what you might expect based on the title alone. But given that its Pride Month 🏳️🌈, the words are intentional. My hope for our future world is that anything we need to say about how we feel, what we experience, or who we are can come out directly, safely, and with fervor.
I have daymares when driving on I-95. That road does something to me. There is a mile marker somewhere around Fredericksburg akin to the gates of hell. While stuck between 4 lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, heat rising off the road in visible tendrils, I imagine what it would feel like to just ram the car in front of me. Not a light love tap, but a really good rage-filled rev right up their tailpipe. Only to throw it in reverse and back up straight in to the hood of the car behind me. This back and forth, back and forth going on until I finally squeeze out some room to just ride up the left or right side. Moving. You know, like you’re supposed to do. On a HIGH-WAY!
These are not isolated moments. My daymares extend to screaming at the woman who skips the four other humans clearly standing in line at the Costco self checkout.
“You selfish bitch! Do you not SEEEEEEEEEE us standing here?!? Are your strawberries more important? Don’t you think I have to pick up my kid in 32 minutes too?!?”
Or what about my evil fantasies of full on body checking the woman walking in front of me with her entire family spanning the full horizontal space of the walking path with zero awareness that there are people, bicycles, dogs, even bugs behind them trying to get through?
And then there’s my make-believe melting, body and soul so emotionally exhausted that I literally dissolve into the ground. A Dali clock, sliding down the stairs from my bedroom, time suspended while I change form from solid to liquid, releasing all that has been contained. It’s a letting go, a letting out, a letting down, a letting that I just can’t let myself do.
I’d never do it. Any of it. At least, I’m almost positive I’d never do it. But I want to. There’s some latent joy there just waiting to be unleashed.
These extreme expressions of emotion seem so freeing, so liberating, so defiant. A head on (literally), straightforward, direct release of exactly what I’m feeling, thinking, or being in that moment. Of course they’re crazy. Unhinged crazy. The emotional equivalent of a grenade - great for flushing out the enemy but also extremely deadly when it explodes in your hand. Anger, rage, sadness, exhaustion, futility, love, exasperation, frustration, hopelessness, horror. We call that crazy, that type of display, but is it? Or is it crazy that we’ve created a society where all of those things have to come out sideways, where the emotion is so tamped down and boxed out and shut up and unfelt that eventually you’ve held it too long and it goes 💥💣💥.
We could gender this, say this expectation of bottling up emotion is largely a female responsibility. That may be true, especially historically, but I wonder if it’s actually more generational. I might argue that no one of my era commands the privilege of honest emotionality without repercussion. We were taught to suck it up, entertain ourselves, know what battles to fight, and be ready to throw ‘dem bows if the situation devolved. We were the Windex generation. It fixes everything - zits, rashes, bumps, bruises, pain, loss.
I feel confident that Gus Portokalos would have squirted that lady in Costco. Problem solved.
For those of us straddling the border between GenX and the Millenial nation, there seems to be no clear answer for whether we are emotionally repressed, emotionally fragile, or just assholes. Some of us (ME!) belong to the “latch key” kid club, our parents allowing us to learn how to manage on our own out of necessity. That seems to have backfired as we then ping pong to the introduction of the “helicopter” parent, those parents who didn’t let their kid so much as sneeze by themselves much less emote. Did our parents simply not have time for emotion so we learned that in the absence of an audience, we just go fix our face, find a way, and carry on? Or were we never allowed to have a hard feeling, to sit with it, to resolve it on our own because our parents made everything better…always? Or are feelings just hard no matter how you parent and we’re all just back to being assholes?
In this fascinating study, a team from SUNY-New Paltz looked at the difference in emotional terminology used by the varying generations. Participants from five different generations were asked to describe slang words they used for six core emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise).
Side bar - I love their categorization of those born after 1995. The “Digital Native.” It’s like they literally came out of the womb with a smart phone and a TikTok account.
What’s interesting is the range of emotion words reported by the different generations. Generation X used 73 words while Millenials used 130. Huh?!?What did they do, create an entire second language for the feels?!? That’s almost double the number of words. And while “Oh My God” was used across all generations, more frequently with GenX and Millenials, Digital Natives felt the need to shorten that to “OMG.” 🙄 Lest I lose you here, the point is that words matter. They provide an indication of how comfortable we are or are not with expressing emotion as their frequency, volume, diversity, and, well, number of letters 🙄 suggest something about how or even if we talk about feelings.
My daughter has B-I-G feelings. They usually come out straight at you, no sideways here, and they often make perfect sense. Nothing will make you feel more emotionally repressed than listening to a 5-year old articulate with words from the feelings wheel how today’s situation on the playground impacted her while you nurse your glass of wine hoping this thing you cannot name that’s bubbling up inside you from today’s work meeting and spousal fight and PTA snafu stay put. My daughter is my own personal DIY YouTube channel on how to emote.
I don’t think she has a generation yet. I can attest that she did not come out with a TikTok account, mainly because her father doesn’t believe in letting China steal our data, but that’s neither here nor there. She has yet to be assigned to a group, labeled as a this or that, lumped in with others like her. I have no idea how we, the parents of her generation, will be blamed for screwing up her and her friends, so for now, we’ll just assume that some part of how they turn out will be our fault. But for now, for today, she’s just Charlie. She feels what she feels. And, based on the countless books I’ve read, podcasts I’ve run to, and historical references on what not to do I’ve internalized, I listen. That’s it.
I listen.
The other day, her father and I were away from home, and her babysitter texted me “I don’t mean to disturb, but is there any way to stop the “I want mommy” tantrums or should I let her tire herself out.” First of all, 😂😂😂. But for reals, I sat there for a minute before responding. My parental instinct, the “helicopter” part of my Millenial brain wanted to jump in with a laundry list of things to try to help her calm down. But the GenX-er in me was like “Meh, she’s not bleeding, give her a popsicle and put her outside. She’ll be okay.” But what I wrote back was…
Tell her you’re sorry she’s upset. She just needs love and a safe space in these moments. Not really anything for you to do.
I really, REALLY wanted to end it with “ROFL!” followed by a “YOLO” but decided that was cruel.
Validation. Companionship. Time. That’s all she needed.
That’s a pretty big fucking ALL.
Of course, it starts with being able to get the feeling out in the first place, a feat I’m still working on. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good road rage, grocery store assault, and body checking, but I think there might be more joy in coming at it straight instead of sideways. In being able to say what I feel, trust that its safe, and ask for the time I need to work through that. Big girl things I’m learning from watching my little girl.
BUT should all this mature adult processing fail, and your shit still needs to come out sideways, please know I’ve got your back. And a bottle of Windex.
Do you think Method glass cleaner would work? I am OG millenial that’s trying to not spritz so many chemicals around. 🤣