Getting Emotional

So, how does that make you feel?

THE INSPIRATION: Teamwork

“Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other.”

—Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart

I’m reading Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart now and to me, whose relationship with my own emotions has been dismissive at best and actively antagonistic at worst, this cartographic peering into emotions—laced with deep thinking about how the emotions feel, how they manifest and what they mean—is probably exactly what I need.

I am reminded of all the times my therapist said, “Where in your body do you feel that emotion?” and I would be like, “I don’t know.” Of course, all emotions are felt in the body, they are the result of chemical spikes our brain sends out and it’s such a wild system. Emotions seem like the source of irrationality. They make us do things, sometimes terrible things, that in the cold light of day we might never consider. They make us say things we don’t mean, and impulsively order an entire manicure set during a period when they are about to move and the goal is to get rid of shit.

Anyway.

The point is that emotions don’t make sense… until you see them as a mode of connection. Until you realize that without emotions, we are just individuals bopping about the universe. But with them, we are community. While there is space in human experience for those of us who work best alone, we all survive only because we are made to function as a team, and our emotions—the source of our vulnerability—are the glue that creates community.

THE FAT ORANGE CAT: So, how does that make you feel?

In your writing, tell me your character is sad without telling me they are sad. How does sadness feel? Where in the body does it manifest? What does it make your character do? Are you imagining them eating ice cream and watching Real Housewives? Take a pause there. That’s the cultural short-hand, and it’s not how everyone experiences sadness.

One character might push sadness away, and behave happiness they don't genuinely feel in order to wash away the thing they don’t want to acknowledge or experience. Another character might embrace the sadness, and use it to fuel their art. Another might seek out the one person they know will sit with them in their sadness without trying to make it better.

And the character who can do that? Who can sit in sadness and not try to fix it? That’s a very special character indeed.

THE TROPE: Love potion

Of all the emotions we feel that may lead us into irrationality and destruction, it’s love. I think the problem with this is that there are so many kinds of love, and yet, we only have the one word.

There’s the love a parent feels for a child, which is different from a romantic, which is different from the love a writer might feel for her cute little MacBook with its clicky-clacky keys that respond so elegantly to her dancing fingers as she gets her ideas down at the last minute for her newsletter due the next day…

Anyway.

The point is, “love” is such a tiny, insufficient word for what might be the most powerful of all emotions. We most often associate it with romance, which is love at possibly its most dangerous. So when we talk about love potions, we are talking about something which will make someone do, say and feel things that make them both extremely dangerous and unbearably vulnerable at the same time.

The Love Potion is a quirky trope, often used in comedic movies or television episodes where we re-set at the end and all is supposed to just be well afterward. We might get a nod toward the complete violation of free will, but usually it’s just a nod.

Imagine using the Love Potion trope in a dark story. Something as sinister as a Love Potion requires darkness in order to be fully explored.

That might be kinda fun, actually.

PERMISSION SLIP: It is okay to…?

I don’t have a question this week, so I’m trying to think of alternative modules I can cycle in here when there aren’t any questions. Today, I’m going to do permission slips, as many of the questions I get asked are of that variety. Is it okay to base a character on someone I know? Is it okay to only write when I feel like it, instead of every day? Is it okay to take inspiration from existing stories or characters?

And of course, y’all know my answer is almost always, “Yes.” Often, it’s a “yes” with some boundaries, but the bottom line is, tell your story. If you need to fix or change something, you can do that on the back end. Even if you screw something up, you’ll learn something from the screw-up.

Perfectionism is a trauma response. Stop being afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes are your friend. Sometimes, they can be the perfect teacher at the perfect time.

THE PRACTICAL: Accepting the rubber-stamp

I’ve been watching Frasier lately as my absent-minded entertainment, and it’s been fun. While farce is not a particular favorite of mine, when someone does it really well, I enjoy it, and Frasier pretty much elevated the form.

That said, I am, once again, shocked and horrified in a revisit of something from the 90s that I found to be harmless fun on my first run through only to discover that it is so gross. Niles’s obsession and constant objectification of Daphne is disturbing to say the least, but I look past it because I love David Hyde-Pierce and Jane Leaves and I can acknowledge what is wrong with something while, at the same time, enjoying it in the way it was intended.

Sometimes I can do that. Sometimes not. There are some things, like Sixteen Candles, that are so offensive that I cannot enjoy them ever again, but Frasier doesn’t cross that line for me. I can see what they did with Niles—which was dangerous and entitled and completely inappropriate—and revise it in my head to be what they intended— sweet and harmless and only damaging to Niles.

You might wonder why Frasier, who is more offensive on a lot of levels, doesn’t bother me as much as a character, and it’s simply because his grossness is clearly acknowledged as such. I’m trying to think of a situation where Frasier wasn’t punished by the text for his pomposity and callousness, and I can’t think of a clear example where he was allowed to get away with it. Yes, he is still loved and accepted by his family, but there is never a moment where we pretend he isn’t a total mess of a human.

But Niles… we rubber-stamp Niles hard. Frasier disapproves of his behavior, but we disapprove of Frasier, so it doesn’t really count. If anything, Frasier’s disapproval is meant to make us see Frasier as a judgmental fussbudget, while Niles gets—textually—a total pass. The text itself does not make Niles suffer for his obsession with Daphne; if anything, the text rewards him for it. The downtrodden, forgotten nerd wins the woman in the end. It becomes palatable only because, when he’s not being gross, Niles is kind and caring and strong and smart and (more often than not) honorable.

I can completely understand why someone wouldn’t care for it. I understand why Ian tapped out in the first season. But it’s still fun for me, and I enjoy it enough to play it in the background while I do other things. After all, Roz and Martin and Eddie are also part of this band of misfits.

Nothing is ever just one thing.