Why 'Emotions'?
On high affective empathy and why poetry became my release
My next poetry collection will be called “Earworms and Emotions”. A while back, I explained the ‘earworms’ half. This post tackles the other side: why emotions - and why poetry became my way of processing them.
The shopping centre was too warm. Too loud. Everyone moving with the same low-grade panic. I left without buying anything.
Call it anticipatory dread. My brain has learned that certain places, at certain times, feel unbearable, and December shopping is one of them.
I have high affective empathy. My nervous system picks up emotional signals before my strategic brain catches up. It’s body-reading, not mind-reading: I sense the temperature of a room, a team, or a person, before the data arrives. In that shopping centre, the data was overwhelming.
In my professional life, this sensitivity is a tool. I notice when someone’s nodding but not agreeing. I feel when a workshop is losing the group before the energy visibly drops.
But the same wiring that makes me good at reading people also extracts a toll. Difficult conversations follow me home. Other people’s stress becomes my stress. And in December - when the cultural script demands joy on schedule - everything intensifies.
Every forced smile in a shop. Every strained conversation at a party. Every person carrying invisible weight. I absorb it without meaning to.
The feeling accumulates.
That’s the part people don’t always understand. It’s not one difficult moment, but an accumulation. Emotional pressure builds with no obvious release.
For years, I didn’t know what to do with it.
Then I started writing poetry. It wasn’t a conscious decision; the words just came to me.
Not as self-expression. Not as therapy. As a pressure valve.
My first collection, Getting it out of my System, says it all in the title. The page receives what my mind can’t hold. Poetry became how I moved emotional material out of my nervous system and into something external.
Here’s an extract from poem called “Today/Tomorrow” from my next collection:
Today, dark clouds loom low.
My heart is overwhelmed by my depression.
My mind is helpless; can’t control the flow
By any means I have in my possession.
Notice the layering. External weather becomes internal weather. The poem doesn’t explain the connection.
Maybe that’s what a “pressure valve” really is: a practice that lets accumulated feeling move through you rather than staying stuck.
For me, it’s poetry. For you, it might be journaling, or something else entirely.
The trick is having somewhere for the feeling to go.
If Christmas feels heavier than it should; if you absorb more than you can easily hold, you’re not doing it wrong.
Some of us are shaped to feel more. The question that actually helps, is, “How do you release what builds up?”
What’s your pressure valve? What practices help you move through the intensity of this season? Let me know in the comments—I’m always curious how others handle this.
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