when emotions turn to language
vulnerability, responsibility, and what makes it all worth it
vulnerability.
Well, I really wanted to write some pieces over the last few weeks, but my mind didn’t…click. There’s a storm in my brain, sweeping ideas almost into the sweet spot of language, but most times the dust settles and I’m left with feeling. I think living in this world gives us a sense of the joy and pain of witnessing community triumphs, worrying over Trump’s executive orders, finding hope in other people’s fights, and feeling hopeless and lost in your own. These are human feelings. Yet, as we experience these emotions, I believe that it is just as human to lack the language to express what it all means. A scream, soft tears, and sobbing transmit a feeling, but sometimes what you wish to express lies unexpressable, both to the people you talk to and yourself.
There are moments in my life when emotions break into language, and those moments of vulnerability are where I feel most connected between my heart and my tongue.
One such moment happened a few months ago. I sent a stupid series of texts to the family group chat, pretty much accusing them of being ignorant, selfish snobs whose inaction was actively harming the world. Sprinkle in a little condescension, the inability to express tone through text messages, and you end up with a radical son doing nothing more than antagonizing his family in a completely destructive manner. Language fails.
But when we spoke in person days later, when I was told about my arrogance and nerve to send such text, I couldn’t help but start to cry. Slowly. And then uncontrollably.
They were right. I was being an arrogant prick. But what made me cry is that my fundamental beliefs in justice, in responsibility, and in using privilege for good, were shattered by the sheer disagreement of my family members. That they were right, but so was I, according to my values. That the world I saw could never be seeable to them, the burdens I carry never shareable, the responsibilities I assume never transferable.
And as I broke down in tears, they saw my fear and distraught at the immense suffering in our world. And they listened as my emotions were strung together into the coherence of language. This is not to say that I magically convinced them to see the world the same way. However, vulnerability through emotion and language together pierced the veil of indifference.
Yet, I don’t write this to be self-congratulatory, to celebrate how my pain inspired change in others. Gross.
I write this to identify that 1) emotion is sometimes the only response that humans have to feelings of being overwhelmed, and that 2) it should be no one’s burden to “carry” the weight of the world. We need to be more empathetic and more responsible for our actions, but taking the world’s crises as our personal battles may be the most selfish thing one can do.
With this being said, I’ll introduce a slightly altered version of a monthly reflection I’ve recently written for my fellowship. This one—a letter home about leadership.
being overwhelmed with emotion.
I feel like I can’t read poems anymore. My mind’s been overwhelmed with thoughts of systemic crisis recently. Or maybe not even recently. At Duke, I spent much of my intellectual energy trying to understand the inner dynamics of the machines that shape human behaviors and institutions, namely capitalism. And it was overwhelming. However, I also 1) had a dedicated community of friends who were equally interested in these topics, and 2) wholeheartedly accepted the privilege of college as a place where I could think about “things” rather than “acting upon them” in my post-college “real life”. I’ve spent this fellowship thinking about a lot of hard questions within the context of La Guajira, Colombia, but often without a community and within the self-imposed burden of “acting upon” my beliefs.
When I get paralyzed in the thinking that “there’s no way out”, or “I don’t have any of the answers,” I often resort to scrolling on passive media, whether it be YouTube videos about cooking or panning over the trailers of different Netflix shows and movies I’ll never watch. In one such trailer, this one of The Whale, the character mentions Whitman’s poem, Song of Myself. And so, instead of committing to watching the movie, I quickly opened up a new tab to read Whitman’s mastery and feel “artful”.
There’s a slow beauty to poems, especially Whitman’s, where digesting each line with relish and purpose is more fulfilling than inhaling patterns, tendencies, and informational bits like a Chat GPT summary. Yet, as I tried to slow my mind down, reading:
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
I couldn’t stop the essential contradictory thoughts circling my mind.
One the one hand, “I want to feel numb. Think nothing.” Scroll. Consume.
On the other, “I want to know everything. Feel enlightened, circle the answer on the chalkboard.”
But what I don’t want to acknowledge is that,
“I don’t have the answers. Almost no one does. There’s only a certain amount of intellectual paths you can take before you realize that it isn’t the end-all-be-all. Some pains, crises, unanswerable questions, perhaps in Laconian fashion, can only be answered with pure emotions and discomfort. Sometimes there’s no language to put on paper that I can read later with satisfaction, but rather an internal scream that is both inexpressible and universally understood.”
For all my talk of community, it’s been the case that I’ve needed to be my own mentor at times as others disappeared. And while some may view this as a triumph, and a necessary pivot (which it was), there’s a danger to relying on oneself. I think that one of my fundamental problems has ironically been employing strategies that neoliberal capitalism employs so well to alienate us: individualism.
responsibility.
I had the pleasure of meeting two amazing people traveling the world to learn about post-development futures in the Global South and hear community stories of resistance and liberation from extractivism. As we were talking, one of them could sense my despair, my insatisfaction with unanswered questions. In essence, the conversation went like this:
She asked, “So what’s really going on with you?”
I said, “What do you mean? Can you be more specific?”
“What are you really worried about? Why are you here?”
After a long sigh, I replied,
“I’m motivated by guilt.”
At my privilege, at how big the world is for me and how much responsibility I have shouldered on myself to take on the world’s “problems” and “undo” them.
And after saying this, she surprised me with a comment that slapped me in the face.
“That’s narcissistic. You’re describing narcissistic tendencies.”
I thought to myself,
“Me??? I’ve been trying to spend my career, my energy, thinking of systemic solutions to the problems afflicting marginalized communities and Mother Earth, and that makes me narcissistic?”
But, after a few seconds of feeling hurt, I realized she was right.
These problems are not mine to shoulder. I am not responsible for the pain caused by the actions of my country. I do have the responsibility to reflect, and to make things better through my personal actions. But nothing I do will “undo” harm, and it’s a selfish thing to think that I am the one that is supposed to be doing that. It is my responsibility to find things that I enjoy, work with people whose company I enjoy, and feel inspired to chip away at the systems that oppress us.
what makes it all worth it.
Sometimes there are unanswerable questions. Or questions where you can scrape partial answers through community engagement and deep listening. It won’t fix everything. It won’t jam the gears of the capitalist machine. But it feels meaningful on a personal level. It feels like you’re in a community, not like you are doing something yourself for others.
I’ve learned through my leadership growth the importance of community. I’ve also witnessed, like we all have, the breakdown of community through technological insertions and iPad kids, doom-scrolling and TikTok, the TV and the atrophying of the physical villages that surround us.
I participate in these destructive tendencies. And I criticize them mercilessly. That’s the whole complexity of it all, what makes it so infuriating, what makes it so beautiful that no YouTube video with fancy graphics, no Marxist analysis focused on working class struggles, no PhD in Economics can adequately capture. There’s no one problem. And there’s certainly no one solution. We are all figuring it out.
There’s no clean ending to this reflection. I guess that’s the whole point. For now, I can stop watching YouTube videos that leave me unsatisfied and bored. I can start walking to the beach and running into people I know, searching for small talk within the midst of cell phones. I can try to reread Whitman’s poem. I can work on my projects in La Guajira with friends, ask questions without expecting tidy answers, and not put my self-worth into bootstrapping a systemic solution to problems that aren’t mine in a foreign country.
Oh, and I also need to find a job.
To being unpolished. With care,
Rishab