Monday #7 thoughts: radical empathy

29/07/24: anger as a secondary emotion

Why did I start this substack?

I pretended to myself it was a business plan, to write about music for money. Instead, it became a door.

Suddenly it was something in my life that was just mine, just for me, a space to process my life without any other narratives clouding it. And I started to see other lives through the door, lives I didn’t think or know existed. 

Some doors had big skies behind them to fall into, and I think they were fantasies. The doors that held reality were half open, suspended in time, and often held monochrome, blurry backdrops. The door I ended up stepping through? The background behind it was blurry, uncertain and shapeshifting. It is the only door I could have stepped through, the only way it could have been.

I’m so glad I did this. Am I a good writer? I don’t know and no longer care. It’s so important to have spaces where we can process things and be ourselves. Art is for everyone.

And how many of us don’t have those spaces? Full time jobs, a society that actively discourages art, families, expectations…How many of us haven’t been able to make art? Never go to therapy? Don’t have access to it? Live on hierarchies, believing these to be the absolute truth? Never leave our caves?

What would have happened if I hadn’t have chosen art at 18?

I was told by everyone around me not to. Where I come from, you didn’t choose art, you chose respectable, real professions. I lost entire support networks to do art. I disappointed everyone around me to do art, to choose myself. That was perhaps the very first cave I left. I was very lonely for a while.

But if I hadn’t have chosen art, I wouldn’t have processed anything. Would I still be closed?

It was a huge choice, to be alone. When I went to study in the big smoke, I would just sit in cafes, scared to speak to new people because I had so badly internalised the rejection I’d experienced for choosing who I really was.

I’d like to talk about what I’m striving for - radical empathy. Radical empathy is ‘to fundamentally change our perspectives from judgmental to accepting, in an attempt to more authentically connect with ourselves and others.’

Right now, I do not have it. At all.

I have anger, which is a secondary emotion.

“Anger is often called a secondary emotion because we tend to resort to anger in order to protect ourselves from or cover up other vulnerable feelings. A primary feeling is what is what is felt immediately before we feel anger. We almost always feel something else first before we get angry.”

I can’t fully feel the edges of my primary feelings, right now, as they are buried, but I imagine they are loss, sadness and heartbreak. I often feel like I kept the peace for so long for nothing, at the complete expense of my health. I gave up how I really felt, what I really wanted in order to be liked. And then nobody liked me anyway.

“People-pleasing ways are always learned early. We learn early that if we behave the way other people want us to, we get rewarded. We grow up exchanging behaviour for rewards which works…until it doesn’t.  

Eventually, our own needs and wants end up being in conflict with what others want from us, and we have been trained to feel responsible for other people’s feelings.  We accept fault for other people’s disappointment and put others' needs ahead of our own feelings. People-pleasers focus more on the perception of others instead of their own happiness and well-being.

Healthy boundaries are impossible to establish because they don't want to 'rock the boat'. They will swallow negative feelings and even jeopardize their physical health in order to keep the peace.”

- The Price Of ‘Keeping The Peace’

I wrote in my iphone notes recently,

“boundaries are the way we have an outline”,

after someone told me I shouldn’t have one.

Boundaries keep us safe, remind us of who we are, stop us taking on the identities, thoughts and beliefs of others, and draw lines in the sand. And in this world, it is exceptionally hard to make and keep them.

In ‘Prisons We Choose To Live Inside’, Doris Lessing says,

“We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”

As my outline finally comes into focus, I want to remember what I wrote in the sleeve of I Slept On The Floor:

The lyrics in ‘I Slept On The Floor’ are an amalgamation of the ever-shifting life I have shared with Another Sky over the last six years, searching for resolution between my hometown-self and the self a new city brought me. It was why in 2017, at St. Pancras Church, Another Sky performed in the dark as silhouettes, big illuminated circles behind each of us. 

People left asking if the singer was a woman or a man. I wanted to ask why it mattered.

I wanted the band to be a mirror, reflecting the darkness back at itself. I thought I had found myself in that darkness.

I grew up in a white picket fence town with a fear of beds, preferring to sleep on the floors of bathrooms in case I got sick at night. My anxiety was so suppressed, so unacknowledged by my environment that my body broke to get my attention. I became very unwell. My body tried to tell me, “you can’t mould yourself into their ideal,” but I didn’t know there was an alternative. I was malleable soil instead, filling a vase, growing into a shape I couldn’t see.

You can’t see the walls around you if they look like the edges of the Universe.

In 2013, I moved to London and thought I’d found a bigger, better vase. Suddenly I was exploding into a world of a million possibilities, but rather than finding myself bursting at the seams, I couldn’t find the edges of myself at all.

Just as my hometown had shaped me, so did London begin to. Among the rising rents and an increasingly hostile political landscape, the pressure to define my limits grew. The world didn’t stop breaking me down just because I had moved on from the confines of my childhood.

Pema Chodron says, “the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.”

I Slept On The Floor documents the childhood rejection we carry with us into adulthood and deals with our ever-shifting identity. We can’t ever truly escape, but perhaps we fall apart and come together again, over and over.

I think radical empathy can only happen after we’ve gotten ourselves to a safe place, have looked after ourselves first and have boundaries around us.

I think anger is part of the grief cycle, and it is an important emotion that needs to be felt. It is also important not to stay there, otherwise you stay in grief.

And I think asking people to have radical empathy before they have fully healed from grief hinders and even stops the healing process, creating a rift in boundaries, breaking lines in the sand.

So I say let anger be felt, do not bury it and move through it as best as you can.

Right now, I am trying to find my safe place in the world. Something all of us deserve, something most of us don’t get. Last week, I went to my childhood park every day to sit and breathe.

I can see now that it was a safe town, and I perhaps took on someone else’s narrative about it.

So here’s to finding my safe space. Hopefully, someday, radical empathy will follow.