Pity is in the Guts: On Emotional Metamorphosis
By Emily Read
In Anatole France’s novel The Red Lily, there’s a sentence that I’ve had embedded in my head for about a year now: ‘Pity is in the guts, just as tenderness is on the skin’. It beautifully encompasses the physical reactions that emotions evoke. The butterflies or the racing heart with nerves, the taste of honey in your mouth or feeling like you’re standing in sunlight that comes with joy. Familiar, not too overwhelming. But when it comes to emotions that perhaps you’ve never experienced to a certain degree; the physical aspect can be all-consuming. And the instinct is to stop these sensations at all costs. I spent a very long time trying to control, compartmentalize, and otherwise numb these feelings and their physical manifestations, but unfortunately tucking them away only leads to a mass exodus later on.
This time last year, at the peak of my attempt to shut out all emotional instinct, I had lost my identity, I was in limbo – I had no concept of who I was, what I liked, what I felt. I was terrified, but I was even more afraid of what I would find if I allowed myself to feel my pain and grieve. However, ready or not, the proverbial Pandora’s box will open, and I was consumed by very physical, visceral grief. And it was just as scary, if not worse than I imagined. It felt interminable. It was vice-like. And it lasted a long time. I was repeatedly told ‘time heals’ and every time I wanted to scream. And of course, I’m writing this a year later and I can say that it truly does. It’s just incredibly slow, so slow that you think you aren’t healing at all, but then one day emerge, tired, drained, triumphant.
Lately I’ve been in a state of curious observation of my emotional and physical self. It’s almost as if I see myself from slightly to the left of me. Similar to my experiences with dissociation, only I’m not petrified, and I’m not far away. I feel like it’s my brain trying to wrap itself around my new self – a more liquid identity. Continual metamorphosis. I feel very ambiguous, I don’t know what inside of me I’m standing on, what is holding me. But it’s different now than at the beginning, I don’t feel like I’m falling through black. Now it feels like drifting through water or space and waiting for anything that resonates with me to pass by so I can grasp it.
If this is familiar to you, I’d highly recommend trying the following visualization. Imagine yourself as a small dot, a warm yellow dot, with a bunch of little feelers out, trying to seek out happiness, but it’s not in pursuit. Just cultivating the conditions for it and hoping for it to cross your path. Because your happiness no longer flows from the same well that it used to. And until you find a new well or spring or source, you are adrift. Try divining joy from everything and anything. Allow yourself to flow and connect and feel. Maybe that’s what you’re meant to be doing anyways, perhaps your journey doesn’t involve a fixed source. Or maybe it does, and you’re walking towards it. Regardless, you, the dot, contain multitudes. You are all that you seek.