Triggered by Guzey’s advice to his younger self, Prot’s essay about fear, and my recent thoughts about feeling abstracted from my feelings, I tried to explicitly introspect about how I was feeling yesterday. I did that by thinking of a situation that felt complicated to me (asking a friend for something), and trying to narrow down what the complication was.

Immediately, my brain began narrating a story about the complication. It was easy to do that (“I just find reaching out hard, that’s the sort of person I am”), and it was similarly easy to mistake that narration for the feeling itself. But maybe because I was reading about Focusing, maybe because of something else, I decided instead to stop thinking and turn to my body to tell me how I felt.

That was much more visceral, much less of a story, and much more surprising (it turns out there was a bundle of things together, but the most salient thing was excitement about asking my friend). This is not information I could have easily gotten if I kept reasoning with words.

Relatedly, whenever people have asked me “how do you feel?”, and when I have bothered to give a nontrivial answer, that has mostly activated my storytelling machinery rather than my introspection machinery. It’s been a little bit about how I feel, yes, but it’s been more about giving the other person context, talking about feelings which are most justifiable given the context, making it a good story, etc., etc. The problem is that I’ve now started doing that external legibility exercise to myself.

For my future self: when you want to know how you feel, ask your body, not your brain. You know how to do this; start with enumerating specific sensations. Then, Focusing.