One thing about me is that I simply cannot keep my cool. No matter what emotion I’m feeling in any given moment, I let people know and I act like it. On a bad day, it may mean that I struggle to regulate my nervous system. On a good one, it may just be that I wear my heart on my sleeve. But the problem with (over)reacting in real time is that it turns processing into performance, and when we talk while something is still raw, we mistake urgency for truth and relief for resolution. What feels like honesty often functions as emotional leakage, an offloading of sensations before any real meaning has formed. And oftentimes, we later regret that emotional leakage.
This urgency to share everything has only intensified in our current age of social media, in which we all engage with ~feelings~, ~thoughts~, and ~ideas~ online first. Substack, for instance, has championed deeply personal essays as an art form, encouraging us to alchemize every passing discomfort, grievance, or half-formed realiz…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Digestifs to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.