Deep in the Feels
For the Art
I’m about to go into some lore (heh) on myself, but the TLDR is that I am having my very first art show! It’s scheduled and it’s real, and now I have to finish the biggest project I’ve attempted yet. I invite you to save the date and to read on to learn why this is such a deeply personal project and one that I sometimes regret, depending on the day 😅.
Emotions have historically been difficult for me, but I didn’t know just how difficult until I started having more of them. I was a highly sensitive kid, and my parents didn’t really know what do to with all my feels when I was young, so they largely just tried to make them go away by way of spiritual bypassing—it’s all they could think to do at the time. Being the rule-following child I was, I did my best to help them in that endeavor, shoving every inconvenient feeling down and winding up with a bad case of depression. As I would understand later, you can’t disconnect yourself from the bad feelings without also disconnecting yourself from the good.
The first step to reconnecting with my emotions was therapy, and I’ve sure done a lot of that. About 15 years so far, on and off, with varying therapists for varying reasons, all largely coming down to my inability to experience emotion without thinking my world is going to come crashing down around me. Therapy helped me learn that my emotions deserve to be felt. But it didn’t really teach me how to feel them in any concrete way. Art did that.
When I started my ugly art experiment, I began feeling emotions that I hadn’t experienced since childhood. Light, goofy, uplifting emotions that made me wonder why I ever did anything else. Of course, that was terrifying because if something as simple as making terrible art could bring me so much joy without me knowing just how much I loved it for almost 30 years, what else didn’t I know about myself? As the positive feelings started to make themselves known in my body, I quickly realized why joy is so often avoided: it can come with so much pain.
Opening up to joy made me realize how much I’d been avoiding, all the ways I’d kept myself hidden and small, held myself back from authentic expression, excluded myself from love and connection. The deep-down belief of unworthiness. My elatedness would be followed by waves of grief, and once I’d opened the floodgates, it was only a matter of time until the protective façade and all the structures I’d relied on—my friendships, my marriage—got swept away as well.
The grief of losing everything opened up a whole other level of emotions that felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest, so I was finally getting real practice feeling the feelings that therapy had told me so much about. But just sitting there in the despair of them wasn’t helpful for me. Because of my tendency to reject my feelings, that would easily turn to numbing and seclusion, so I started painting my feelings.
It was in this process that I started experiencing the ephemeral nature of emotions. They could change so quickly. Could be fickle, really. The way emotions are tied to the nervous system makes them fairly malleable if you’re open to it. And painting is a beautiful way to sit with a feeling and give it time to run its course, to tell its stories, and to maybe move along.
Engaging in the same practice over three years has taught me a lot about my feelings, but there is still so much I continue to wrestle with, especially when shame enters the picture. Fighting with my emotions and arm wrestling my shame is a favorite pastime, one I’m sure my therapists and loved ones shake their heads at me about, but I am stubborn and curious and determined. What happens when we don’t run from discomfort, and what is available to us on the other side when we’re focused on love and connection? Turns out some pretty amazing things, and also some really hard things. I mean, the hard things happen anyway, so why not get the amazing things while you’re at it? So I sit and I paint and I examine my feelings, asking each one what they want, where they’re from, and what they need, a practice of trying to identify deeper truths about myself while trying not to dismiss important clues about my desires and needs.
In a season of life and a time in history where I’m experiencing a wide array of emotions in any given moment, I thought about doing something specific with this practice. I wanted to map out all the feelings and recreate the Feelings Wheel with my little circles. Turns out, there are 130 feelings on that thing! It felt like a someday project that I might never actually do, until I met Lis Desrosiers.
Lis is a fellow intuition-driven artist who has found much healing in allowing the art to take the reigns and draw out her emotions and tell the story that she needs to tell. We clicked immediately and soon discussed doing an art show together, inviting in Ashley Laufer and finding a venue with Antonio Holguin, which was the nudge I needed to actually put this wheel together. So here I am, about a month and 10 days away from my very first art show, practicing that delicate dance of telling the paint what to do and allowing intuition and flow to reveal each of these emotions to me, all the while having to remember why I avoid some of these emotions in the first place, because they SUCK to actually feel and why did I agree to this again?? But then I’ll get into flow and depict some really juicy feelings that just feel so perfect, and I’m sucked right back in, feeling vindicated (is that on the list?) and excited to keep going.
There are also feelings on this wheel that I’ve avoided so intensely that I hardly even know what they feel like, so now I’m considering going on a feelings hunt to intentionally seek out feelings that are weird and uncomfortable so that I can paint them from authenticity. I might be some kind of masochist? Who knows.
Aaanyway, I’m making good progress, and I’m excited to see how this unfolds, one circle at a time! I hope you’ll follow along and I’d love to see you at the show in March! Be sure to save the date and share with your fellow artists and highly sensitive people—we got a lot of feelings, and it’s nice to be seen in our muchness.
More to come! Thanks for reading 🧡