On emotional nourishment & week 44 of 52
dropping denial and letting discomfort teach us
I wanted to walk to the small park near my house, maybe sit on one of the Leopold benches by the creek and write; instead, I responded to buzzing notifications on my phone.
When I glanced down, I saw a story about radical (and seemingly enthusiastic) cuts to inclusivity programs and investigations at my workplace where I am the president of a women’s leadership organization (with the redflagged word “woman” in the title no less).
This organization is mentioned in the very first of the 52 Weeks: AYTL post. At the beginning of this challenge, I had the idea that I wanted to live with more purpose. Writing, teaching, and leading were my aims this year, along with reconnecting with myself and my community.
Who could’ve imagined we’d have the world we have now? The dominant emotions in my life a year ago were excitement and enthusiasm. In March 2025, I’m finding more confusion and anger laced with sadness. I find myself reaching for hope.
While I believe deeply that we can find radical joy at this moment, I also feel compelled to acknowledge, that we should feel ALL THE THINGS. And if we deny ourselves our rage, sadness, and worry, we are not truly living.
Emotions are human, and emotions are supposed to move.
In emotional intelligence training, we learn that suppressing emotions means feeding them. They get stuck if suppressed or ignored, and over time make it feel like everything around us is stuck, too, or that we are stuck in whatever fate the environment is handing us.
We are not stuck.
So what is the role of negative emotion, and why not anesthetize it at every turn, rationalize it away, or say that we’re happy until we are?
“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories [...] water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”
―Clarissa Pinkola Estés
I felt numb when I first saw programs that support marginalized populations being slashed. I felt angry and sad, then absolutely enraged. The injustice felt so axiomatic that it was difficult to articulate. There was nothing to explain, it just was. I didn’t have words, even though I know silence is worse than over-explanation.
So I journaled. I did scream. I processed and wrote and walked and meditated with more dedication, feeding my emotions into my explorations, which, in turn, began to feed me. I am engaging in meetings over the next few weeks and will likely hear the fate of my program. I will also have to communicate with people who think nothing is wrong.
Do it with me.
Feel so you can let the thing move. Feel so you don’t numb out. Feel so you can take action.
Imagine we have 8 weeks to live and must see everything before us as enhancing our life right now, nourishing us.
Try, just try, to think of all experience—even pains—as an offering, a teaching.
The short writing prompt is a follow-up to a course I offer on Rewriting and Redefining Reality. It speaks to the way we can work with anger.
Pick it or any “negative” emotion as your catalyst this week, and let’s live with it, explore it, and learn from it, not despite it.
AYTL experiment: Find a way to nourish yourself with difficult emotions through physical release (scream, run, dance, pound the ground with your fists), or by reflecting on them in writing and focusing on them in your contemplations.
Writing prompt: How can emotions that hurt, actually feed you? Answer in any genre or art form.
