Brene Brown did a podcast last spring called Permission to Feel. She said that the average American can identify three emotions - mad, sad, glad. If you’ve watched Inside Out (one of my favorite movies) you can probably add disgust and fear to the list.
This limited emotional vocabulary leaves us vastly unprepared for the human experience.
In a matter of hours or days or seconds, you might feel anxious, disappointed, and enraged as you witness a violent mob descend on the US capital. Or you might feel hopeful, elated, and relieved to usher in a new president and a woman Vice President for the first time in American History.
You might feel exhausted from living through such a prolonged state of crisis and you might feel inspired by Amanda Gormon’s message of hope in her inauguration poem The Hill We Climb.
How do you process these feelings?
To quote my friend Cait Donovan, who hosts a fantastic podcast on burnout, it is okay to admit you are not okay.
In fact, I challenge you to eliminate the word okay from your vocabulary. Someone recently challenged me to stop using good, fine and okay because they’re words that don’t mean much.
Instead, start naming what you’re actually feeling. Challenge your brain to think beyond glad, sad, and mad and make space for those feelings.
My word of the year is allow.
I chose this word as a reminder to allow all my feelings, to not pass over the anger, fear, sadness, grief, and exhaustion, and commit to experiencing it all.
The impulse is to push them away but it's actually allowing them that will help you let them go.
