Noticing

Noticing

It is the first and most challenging step in learning to feel your feelings.
How ironic it is that we’ve unlearned how to feel a feeling.

I notice that thought.

It draws attention to itself in the most covert way.
This poem was meant to be about joy.
I sat down to notice my joy and experience it in the moment.
Instead, I was met with a paradox

Intellectualizing

What is it to intellectualize an emotion?
I think to myself,
As I tuck my joy away
In favor of noticing that thought

I sit with it,
the feeling of noticing,
now far removed
from the joy I sat down to embrace

Sitting

Therapists say to “sit with your emotions”
And so I do that,
But sitting does not put my mind to rest.
How can I tell my brain to rest?

How can I say to her,
When she so clearly knows,
As, here I am, having this thought,
That she needs to sit and rest?

Rest

And it suddenly occurs to me,
I cannot tell her to rest.
She is me
And me is noticing her noticing me noticing her noticing noticing noticing

Feeling is not noticing
It is not labeling or speaking about or thinking about -
It is
feeling

Breathing into the hug of tightness in my chest when it wants to burst with joy
Leaning into the warmth of the butterflies in my tummy that remind me of times when I could not breathe

And I feel them relax

When they realize
I am breathing

The muscles in my body are tense and tender
From years of them feeling what I could not.
But I am my body and she is me
She was feeling it this whole time

We feel a sigh escape our lips
and the hug in my chest turns to a tight grip.
How unfortunate it is that I-

The suffocation yields to softness

how beautiful it is
that I get to experience something so

human,

so innate,

on such an intimate level