"Do You Feel Like You Were Allowed to Show Emotion As a Kid?"

For the past few months, I've been getting closer to a friend who enjoys the same kinds of conversations I do: marriage, spiritual exploration, coping with depression, personality types, emotional intelligence, childhood development, boundaries—you know, the fun stuff XD

In some ways, I consider myself to be an open book, or at least a book that is willing to be opened. I don't go around wearing my heart on my sleeve and I can usually hide socially inappropriate thoughts and feelings, but I will answer almost any question you ask me. There are VERY few topics that are off-limits for me. This friend has never asked me anything that I wasn't happy to answer—but she has asked me a lot of things no one has asked before.

A few weeks ago, during a conversation that I'm gonna simplify into "having difficulty expressing feelings," she asked,

"Do you feel like you were allowed to show emotion as a kid?"

I hesitated for a second because I'd never considered that question before. I think I probably dry chuckled before saying,

"Well, the short answer is yes...but with two big conditions. I do think my parents believed that emotions were natural and healthy, but for one parent, the emotion had to make sense. Emotions that were irrational or of unknown origin were often unacceptable. For the other parent, I was allowed to have emotions as long as they were polite. Emotions that came out in ways that were perceived as disrespectful were not treated as legitimate."

I think when I was growing up, society emphasized...I honestly don't even know. Appearances, maybe? Kids were trained to appear normal and polite, and the neatest way to do that was to teach them to get rid of everything inside that was inconvenient. Lots of "YOU MAY NOT THROW A TANTRUM" and less "Your feelings are very real. I recognize that you are three and you do not have the cognitive development to manage your disappointment in the way that I, an adult, would. You are having big feelings and I am going to be in this moment with you calmly, and after I've helped you regulate yourself, we'll talk about better ways to manage your disappointment in the future."

I'm still processing all of this, and while I do, I'm also holding a lot of other truths in mind:

1) Every generation of parents tries to do better than the one before.

2) Every generation of parents is doing the best they can with the knowledge they do have.

3) As far as I know, these findings about how children's brains develop is new-ish, or at least new enough that parents twenty, thirty, forty years ago didn't know they were asking their kids to do things that their kids were developmentally incapable of doing.

4) Science and philosophy are constantly evolving. It's possible that what I believe now may be deemed ridiculous and inappropriate by the time I have grandkids.

5) I have no children and have no idea how difficult it is to go the long route when it comes to helping a child develop emotional intelligence. All this stuff may sound great in theory until I have to do it. Maybe I'll get to see one day.

I'm definitely not blaming my parents for being feelings-repressed myself. I think I was born that way. On the enneagram, I'm dominant in Type Eight, and Type Eights are, in fact, feelings repressed. In MBTI, I'm an ENFJ, which is other-peoples'-feelings dominant, but my-feelings repressed. That checks out too. It's just interesting to think about the frameworks we were raised with, and how they manifest as an adult. Growing up is about learning, but it's about unlearning too.

I'm so grateful that God gave me Gabe, who is my opposite in most ways. Enneagram-wise, he's feelings-dominant; MBTI-wise, he's his-feelings dominant. He's slowly teaching me that there really is a place for feelings and that MY feelings—independent of anybody else in any way—deserve a second glance. They're not always the deciding factor (which is what he's learning), but they deserve to be dug up and acknowledged.

Sometimes my feelings aren't going to make sense—and that's actually okay. They don't have to be logical to be real. Feelings aren't truth, but neither are they trash. Sometimes my feelings aren't going to manifest politely—and, as an adult, it's my job to figure out how to fix that, so that if we ever have kids, I can teach them to do it too.

Starting to think that becoming a good human is gonna take a lifetime ;)

~Stephanie

Grief and Gift Lists

I consider myself to be bad at gift-giving. It's one of the reasons Gabe and I switched birthdays. Years ago, to alleviate some of the stress of gift-giving, I started keeping a note in my phone of gift ideas. I add to it throughout the year whenever I see good gift or whenever a person mentions wanting/needing something. It's helped me a lot.

A few days ago I was going through the list and two names leapt out at me: Paw Paw, and Nana. We lost both of them this year.

I found myself just staring at my phone, sort of shocked and frozen. Then in a flash of heartstring snipping, I double tapped and deleted Nana's paragraph of ideas.

No, my heart said gently. Put it back. I shook my phone, selected Undo Typing, and was once again staring at "glass bird feeder things you stick in the ground, pink poinsettia, Target gift card, wind chimes, coloring book, Adopt a Cardinal (see screenshot 12/10/21)."

Suddenly the realization that I would never get to do the Adopt a Cardinal thing for her was really sad. She would've really liked that, I think, or at least thought it was weird and funny.

We'll never get to build a contraption that allows Paw Paw to play the piano without his leg, or give him music for his harmonica, or interesting colored pencils for coloring.

Nana and Paw Paw will never get to see if Gabe and I have kids, or if I publish the Fire Faery Story. Paw Paw always asked about my writing; Nana read the first chapter of Book 1 and said that "it wasn't really her thing, but she thought it was very good."

Gabe and I have three Christmas ornaments of Paw Paw's that he gave us a few years ago when he stopped having his own tree. We've put them up every year, but this year it felt different, of course. As we decorated, I started thinking about the Gift Ideas note and seeing Paw Paw's ornaments and realizing that this is the first Christmas Mom has ever had without her parents and it all just felt so sad. I started crying.

"I feel sad," I said, because, as with a toddler, Gabe and I have been working on my acknowledging and voicing my emotions.

I don't remember all that I said, but it really boiled down to "I'm sad that my grandparents aren't here anymore."

Gabe hugged me and I cried and after a couple of minutes we pulled apart and I was like, "What's weird?" because the vibe between us was really off, unusual.

"I don't know," Gabe said, confused and taken aback.

"No, something is weird with you," I said, watching him. "Your energy is weird."

"I don't..." Gabe seemed at a loss.

"I guess I don't really do this," I said. "I don't really...cry about things."

"You really don't," Gabe said, with the hopeful, nervous energy of a friend watching Hulk shrink back to his human form. "I guess I don't really know what to do."

I shrugged and kind of laughed. Me neither.

For a while I've been thinking about the idea of thinking your emotions versus feeling your emotions. I'm pretty sure blogging about it counts as "thinking," but being shocked by the gift ideas, deciding to keep them, and crying while decorating the tree...maybe that's feeling?

I'm sad. I miss hearing Paw Paw answer the phone with "Hey sweet girl!" I miss Nana telling me that I "look so prurty." They both always made such a point of telling me how much they loved me, and Gabe too.

It feels confusing/incomplete/truncated that they're gone, like getting to the end of a book and realizing the last page is torn out, like going to update my NaNo word count and the + button is gone, like driving to an old house and finding it bulldozed. A bewildered feeling of, "What, wait, I wasn't finished yet." How can they be gone? Forever?*

I haven't dealt with a close death in the family since Papa died when I was seven. I guess I'm learning how to grieve as an adult. I hear it comes in waves, stages.

I'm gonna keep their gift lists in my phone.

~ Stephanie

* I know, Heaven and everything. But it feels permanent right now in a way that is so alien.

Did I Actually Win National Novel-Writing Month?

What is NaNoWriMo? It's National Novel-Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 new words of a novel in November. It usually goes something like this for me, but this year was different—in a lot of ways.

For NaNo 2023, I had three goals, in order.

1) Have fun: don't stress about voice and point of view, don't get bogged down trying to avoid YA taboos, don't be afraid to write scenes that are "just for character development" or don't have explicit scene goals.

2) Stop if my mental health starts to deteriorate.

3) Write 50,000 words.

Did I win? The short answer is yes, but if you're here for the short answer, you're in the wrong place. This blog is for the long answer, which is...like, it's still yes, but with caveats.

What Was Different About NaNo 2023?

1) For the first time EVER, I did not write part of the Fire Faery Trilogy. I've been writing and rewriting the Fire Faery Story since I was twelve years old. I took a long break after high school, started up again for NaNo 2019, and have been at it ever since. Not only does the story now have a lot of baggage, guilt, and stress associated with it, but I was starting to believe that it was the only thing I COULD write. I mean, I haven't tried to write something different in like twelve years. Gabe and Aaron have been encouraging me to write writing something else for a long time, and I finally kind of did.

I wrote the backstory of a FFS character named Kamaria. This may seem like cheating to some people since Kamaria is still a character in the Fire Faery Story, it's the same world, and a few other FFS characters appear in it.

I hear you, but believe me, it was not the Fire Faery Story. It felt like a very different assignment.

2) I did not write every day, and I didn't worry about it. This was huge and absolutely unprecedented for me. Gabe and I went away for a weekend and I didn't write at all on the Saturday, nor did I let that bother me. No guilt. No preoccupation. I did not write that day, and it was fine. I also didn't write any on November 29, the day after I'd hit 50,000 the day before, which brings me to the next thing.

3) I did not max out my word count. Confession time: Hitting 50,000 words alone doesn't usually mean much to me. NaNoWriMo is never really a question of IF I'll win, but by how much. Every year since 2019, I've ended the month with a higher word count than the year before. Sure, the NaNo website and my Facebook page say that the goal is 50,000 words, but I know about the SECRET goal, which is really to surpass the year before. Anything less than that is technically a loss. I've backslidden. I've deteriorated.

As a result, my NaNo progress typically looks something like this:



This year, it looked like this:



This year, a huge part of me is still screaming that while, sure, I got over 50,000 words, I didn't get over 55,875, so how good should I REALLY feel about myself?

I'm working on it.

As a result, I don't feel the sense of relief that I usually feel on December 1, which I am kind of missing. Instead of going from "obsessive and exhausted" to "sweet relief," I'm going from "having a goal I'm casually pursuing" to "not getting to track my progress every day on a chart." It's kind of a bummer.

4) I counted more types of words toward my goal than I usually do. The NaNo rules are somewhat flexible. Some writers count only the words in the manuscript itself, some count their outlines, some don't even believe in hitting Backspace during the month. In the past, I've been a "just the actual manuscript" type of WriMo and I definitely hit Backspace a lot. I have even been known to—*gasp*—EDIT during NaNo, which is universally discouraged.

This year, I gave myself what felt like a truly ridiculous amount of grace. I counted everything I wrote toward the story in November, including outlines, character information, deleted lines, and one embarrassing paragraph of 1,300 words that is not even about the story; it's a stream-of-consciousness brain dump from Thanksgiving night. (Don't worry, I still got over 50,000 words of book-related content, so I still won.)

What Did I Learn?

1) Maybe most importantly, I learned that I still CAN write something other than the Fire Faery Trilogy. It had been twelve years since I'd tried to imagine a new culture and I wasn't sure if I could still be creative in that way. As it turns out, I CAN. What a wonderful surprise to find new colors and customs and languages in my brain just waiting to be uncovered.

2) I can successfully meet a goal without sacrificing my mental health. I don't think I believed this before NaNo this year. Something about my personality was CONVINCED that if I didn't obsess over writing to the exclusion of all else, it wouldn't be enough. Well, that's not true, and now I have to rethink some things.

3) I have issues with expectations of myself. I'm still having a hard time "feeling" like I won NaNo, for many of the above reasons. There just seem to be a lot of asterisks. Gabe insists that not only did I win NaNo, I should feel extra good because I did it while taking care of myself, which ought to be a victory in itself. I hear that, but...it just sounds like a participation trophy.

I'm working on this too XD

4) I think I need a stronger prescription in my glasses. This is pretty self-explanatory, but there is no reason I should need Word to be at 180%.

5) There's something wrong with my relationship with the Fire Faery Story. For the past couple of years, I actually feel sick when I work on it. It's like all of my energy goes to the story instead of to digesting food. If I set a timer and only work on the story for one hour at a time with NO exceptions, it seems to be manageable. I did not have stomach issues while writing Kamaria's backstory for NaNo this year—until it intersected with a character from the main trilogy.

On November 15 I posted on Facebook that my stomach had been doing well so far. The next day, Kamaria encountered a certain character, and from there on out, I did have some issues.

The mind is a powerful thing—too powerful for my taste XD

In addition to all the things I learned about myself and my process, I learned a lot about Kamaria too. I've always known her backstory, but being able to flesh it out was fun and beautiful. I now think that I will publish it one day (this is in the universe where I actually get around to publishing ANY of this), but it'll be a little stand-alone that serves as like Book 2.5 of the trilogy. It will not have a grand "story question" aside from answering the question, "How did she get here and why is she like that?"

In the meantime, Fire Faery groupies can listen to Billie Eilish's "bury a friend" and let their imaginations run wild.

~Stephanie