The Ferocity of Feeling: How We Learned to Look Away

The Blacksmith's Daughter

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King David, newly crowned and hungry for power, stood atop the palace steps and bellowed,

“How glorious our red sky! A sign of strength, order and prosperity.”

The people looked up in confusion, but no one dared utter a word. Day after day, like ritual, the King repeated his proclamation until the silence became agreement.

Some villagers stopped looking up altogether, missing the slow drift of clouds, the moon’s quiet rise, the twinkling stars.

One day, the young daughter of the blacksmith turned to her father and whispered,

“Daddy, the sky is blue.”

Her father gasped, fear twisting his handsome face.

“Don’t be so stupid, child. The sky is red. Now let’s put an end to this nonsense.”

The little girl, hesitant to abandon what her own eyes knew, was branded difficult, emotional, dramatic. She had been a joyful, spirited child, but over the years she learned to believe the stories about the red sky — and, more tragically, the stories about herself.

The brilliant blue — now only a whisper — would visit her dreams. And she’d waken with tears she couldn’t explain.

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We carry around a peculiar assortment of luggage, neatly packed with a book of rules and a bundle of beliefs. One such belief is that emotions are either good or inherently bad. This duality is the foundation of our emotional conditioning, but like many of our inherited truths, it's just another fable.

Emotions are the language of our body, messengers offering cues that tell us how to respond in a given situation. Every childhood has its own emotional landscape, nurtured, cultivated and pressed deeply into the soil, often from seeds passed down through generations. It becomes part of our behavioural education, one we take with us into adulthood. But, because that education taught us to categorise our feelings into positive and negative camps, it also taught us to label ourselves.

The Emotional Gate-crasher

But what truly are emotions? They are those pesky disturbances that arrive unannounced, with all the tact of an impolite dinner guest — a creeping blush during a moment of praise, an errant tear when watching a movie, our righteous fury when someone cuts the queue. They often appear inconveniently, before our thoughts have time to catch up. We may even find ourselves asking, with genuine surprise, where did that come from?

Being creative beings, we feel an urgency to decode the puzzle, so with tears brushed aside, we summon our inner author. Within a nanosecond, we are scrambling to interpret our uninvited guest and find a compelling story.

Our feelings are the stories we bestow upon our emotional gate-crasher. To craft the narrative, we look for context and dig through our library for a frame of reference.

In essence, emotions are our bodily reactions (heart racing, breathlessness, butterflies), feelings are the stories we attach to them.

A blush may have been written as shame, tears as weakness or self-indulgence and anger as lack of control. But many of those definitions were handed to us long ago, by people who’d never been taught how to name and share their own feelings. And we continue to utilise them, not because they’re true, but because they offer a compass, however inaccurate, to navigate this messy life.

But what happens when we follow an inaccurate compass for too long?

Those early distinctions — the red skies, the misnamed anger and the flurry of tears — begin to shape more than our emotional understanding. They form our beliefs about ourselves. What started as a bodily sensation became a story, and that story became a rule.

In time, we stop questioning where the rule came from. We carry it forward, believing it to be our own voice, our own truth — never noticing the echo of someone else’s hand on the page.

Thank you for reading. Comments and questions are always welcome.

Until next time