Your emotions are trying to tell you something, especially if the same sort of event sparks the same feeling several times.

You may have noticed, while reading the stories in this section, I mention rage and annoyance a fair amount.

From this limited information, you might draw the conclusion that I am just an angry person. That’s actually not so. My temper is volcanic: it’s a very slow burn, but when it erupts, it can be incredibly destructive. 

Growing up, I learned to pay close attention to the beginnings of my anger in order to avoid a bigger eruption down the line. I looked for the pattern to better understand: Why am I getting upset? What can I do to change the root of the problem rather than continue to get upset at every instance? 

In psychology, these emotional patterns—where a certain external circumstance ignites a consistent emotional response—are often called “triggers.” A “trigger” is a very specific sort of touchstone, one where an emotional snarl has enough energy to help an individual to learn something about themselves. That self-knowledge helps them change their story’s trajectory, pivoting it back towards their chosen target. 

With that in mind, let’s take another look at those stories:

In the first story, I was (understandably) angry with my coach for not believing me about my health. My anger was directed mostly outward.

In the second, I was angry at the deadline, the people who had created the deadline, and myself for choosing the deadline over getting the rest I knew I needed. 

From those two stories alone, you can start to see the pattern: I had a trigger around health, especially when I had to choose helping other people over tending to my own health.

Now, let’s look at the third instance of rage: 

I was getting frustrated with getting hurt in barre class, and I was annoyed at the instructor for telling me to do things that were going to re-injure old wounds. Then I began to get angry with myself for being annoyed at the instructor who was only doing her job.

But I was also practicing self-acceptance. I could hear my mind starting to blame me for things, and I paused that line of thought. I accepted that I was getting frustrated with the instructor and with the class, and I told myself it was okay. 

Then I asked myself why. 

And I knew: I had a problem with authority. After my college coach, I didn’t like people telling me what to push past my body’s limits, because I didn’t feel safe with their instructions.  

In that moment of realization, the instructor, trying to encourage us, mentioned how great our inner thighs would look. 

Because I already had some clarity and self-understanding around my trigger, I didn’t get mad again. Instead, I understood something new: the class was focused on the result of changing your body to a certain look. I was focused on the result of feeling safe and healthy in my body. These targets were not the same, and in my particular circumstances, these targets also weren’t comfortable.  

The class wasn’t the problem, and neither was I. The problem was the combination.

I was simply in the wrong place.

My anger wasn’t a problem. My anger was trying to tell me something. It was trying to let me know that my situation wasn’t working for me and that it was time to try something new.

If I had blown past my anger, or if I’d gotten mad at myself for being upset rather than accepting it, I wouldn’t have been able to look for the root cause of the problem. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to solve it.

So, I did solve it. I left and never came back.

Instead, I realigned with my target without the barre class. I invested my resources in experimenting. I devised my own way to helping my body return to health and stay there. I still do. 

Though this instance of investigating my emotions happened in 2018, I’ve done a version of this since college. I’ve actually done it regularly since the afternoon when I lost my words. (That was also when I committed to writing in my journal daily as a practice of self-regulation through self-understanding.)

So, this process shows up in my stories as the significant shift, which includes both the climax and the epiphany, turning into the resolution and new understanding of self. 

When Lena lost her hands to her own inventions, for example, Lena was horrified and grief-stricken, but she didn’t stop there. She accepted what happened, with the help of her best friend, and she also remembered something important: after what had happened with the first weapon she invented, she had hesitated to make more of them—let alone a more destructive version. She had been afraid of what might happen, but when the Director insisted, Lena had pushed past her own hesitation and fear. 

As it turns out, that emotional response had been healthy fear and wise hesitation. Ignoring them in favor of the Director’s orders had major consequences. Specifically, it cost Lena her hands and turned her from just a kid inventor into an inventor-sorceress.

And with that information about herself and what happened, Lena decided to trust her fear and her hesitation over what others expected from her. 

After that, she doesn’t ignore her instincts again. She instead declares that she makes the rules around her own inventions. She instead tells Searcaster, “I am the weapon.” 

We are often encouraged to ignore our emotions and to simply do what we’re expected to do. It’s not the Director’s fault—or my barre instructor’s fault, or my college coach’s, or the fault of those people who created the work deadline. 

Resistance to exploring deep and consistent emotion is a cultural problem, much like the cultural resistance to discussing grief we saw in the first story. However, these are both honing story currents. Because Lena and I turned towards our own emotions in spite of this cultural resistance, we were better able to resist what other people told us we should do later.

Instead, we focused on what was necessary to become a fuller version of ourselves.