During my time living in San Francisco, I picked up a new way of interacting with others that didn’t exist in my Asian immigrant household. Going to talk therapy had started to become normalized, and the book “Non-Violent Communication” was being read by every person I know. Not only was it cool to openly talk about feelings, but to dissect, analyze, and even “hack” them. (CBT, anyone?)

This was in drastic contrast to the culture of my upbringing, where feelings were never shared, conflicts often lead to accusation and yelling, and they were resolved through cut fruit and pretending nothing happened. After some time in San Francisco, I considered myself “more evolved” than past me, now that I had language to describe my complex emotional landscape. I, and everyone around me, were able to transcend shouting matches, nasty feelings like hatred, doing things out of spite, and holding petty grudges.

LOL JUST KIDDING, that last part wasn’t true at all!!! Emotions like jealousy still came up but they were pathologized, viewed as a bad thing that needed to be overcome. Anger was still present, except it was shamed and suppressed. People around me still lied, still manipulated, still hid things from one another. People still cheated and dated each other’s exes, creating a complex web of who shouldn’t be invited to who’s party. People still pissed each other off. People still felt slighted and harboured disdain. The only difference was these feelings were now hush hush, hidden under the guise of politeness and “being drama-free”. (Or sometimes, hurtful behaviours were done openly, and anyone who got angry was considered insecure, possessive, or close-minded.)

I saw the hypocrisy in all of this only after moving to New York City, where the norm is being so blunt and unapologetic that it has a reputation of being a city of assholes. For the first time in a long time, I noticed myself declaring, loudly and proudly, things like:

• “I don’t like so-and-so. No reason, I just don’t like her at all.”
• “I’m PISSED at this person. I don’t care if they had a reason, I need to talk trash about them right now.”
• “Yeah I’m petty as fuck, take it or leave it.”
• “Fuck this person. I don’t need to listen to their side of the story, what they did was fucked up.”

It felt so bad but also SO FREEING at the same time. For a while I thought I was regressing in my emotional intelligence, not caring about seeing both sides of a situation and allowing myself to carry such strong bias. I thought I was becoming “less evolved”, catching myself throwing shade and raising my voice.

I now understand that this is not regression, but reconnection. Intellectualizing and analyzing our emotions from a distance as if they were a puzzle to be solved, is the exact opposite of embodiment. It takes us out of our bodies into our minds. The mind is prioritized, and the body is pathologized.

Now I’m all for talking through our emotions, learning to communicate in ways that don’t hurt each other, and resolving conflicts peacefully. But this kind of cognitive, thought-centered, rationality-driven way of approaching the emotional experience can definitely be taken way too far. I know many people who are so disconnected from their feelings that they don’t even realize it, because they intellectualize the shit out of them.

And let’s be honest, considering myself “more evolved” meant that I considered myself superior. I thought I was better than others for being able to articulate my emotions through the lens of a specific framework and disown my negative feelings. This is not simply emotional detachment, this is supremacy at work. This kind of emotional bypassing is a tool of colonialism, driven by control. Others have explained it much better than me, and I strongly urge you to read these words by one of my coaches, Simone Seol.

This post is a reflection of something I’ve been going through in the past 24 hours: a silly situation where miscommunication resulted in me feeling hurt. Despite me understanding the miscommunication, I still felt hurt, and I still wanted to vent about it. I wanted to kick and scream and talk shit, and have that all be validated and reciprocated by my friends.

And these days, I’m not only fine with it, but I actually like that I’m like this. This is how I best process my emotions, and I no longer see myself as less evolved because of it. I am, in fact, a better version of me because of it.