First up is reassurance. It can help to think about a situation, or maybe more than one, that you struggled with in the past, something that felt endless, yet you found ways to move through it. Even if sleep challenges have been with you for a long time, new layers of healing and understanding are always possible. This might be a chapter that's asking for patience and new tools, but you can learn to support yourself through it and find resources that help.
By that, I meant work that doesn't seek to explain itself, not out of a pretentious desire to keep people out but more out of an inner intensity, a desire to enmesh you within its concept-world by experience rather than sitting and pointing and lecturing about any given thing in the book. Music, it turns out, is the best way to make this clear; songs, especially truly great ones, don't explain their emotional character to you but instead make you feel it.
At her age, I kept my emotions to myself. Growing up, expressing my emotions was often thought to be a show of weakness or rebellion, and calling out my mother on something certainly wasn't an option I ever considered.
Emotional tears have been considered honest and sincere signals, most likely because they are difficult to shed on demand. At the same time, people acknowledge that tears can be strategically used to manipulate others - so-called crocodile tears.
Falon Stutzman develops a language of flattened perspective, bruised color, and big-eyed emotional states, congealing around a cartoonish archetype of personhood that's both absurd and uncomfortably familiar.
"Yearning is a little bit different from love in that it's more intense. It feels like you're constantly reaching for more. Like, you deeply care about a person and want them to know how much you care about them."
EMO+ started as a tool for adults on the autism spectrum, helping them interpret and express emotions together without the pressure of finding the 'right' words.
Athletes like Justin Rose and Harriet Dart showcase the extremes of emotional response in sports, raising the question of whether showing emotion enhances or hinders performance.