Feelings are not, shall we say, my strong suit. When I was nineteen years old and a freshman in college, my cousin Kym died. It was a sudden and unexpected death. I remember that first rush of grief as my parents told me by phone and my sudden tears. And then I remember trying to suppress my grief and tears so I did not embarrass myself in front of my roommates.

For most of my life, I did everything I could to suppress negative feelings. Loneliness? Bury it. Anger? Bury it. Sadness? Bury that shit. More often than not, I used food to keep my feelings in check.

I am working now to build my emotional intelligence. I want to get naked with my feelings and welcome all of them into my life.

Step One: I have to forgive myself for suppressing my feelings for so many years.

Step Two: I have to realize there is nothing to forgive. I was just doing my best to get by in a society that too often sees feelings as a sign of weakness.

The Noom app is helping with this. I am currently working my way through a bunch of lessons about emotions.

But I want to go even deeper in this work, so I am currently reading Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves And Our Society Thrive by Mark Brackett. Brackett was a guest on Brene Brown’s podcast Unlocking Us and I immediately ordered the hardback version of his book after listening to his conversation with Brene. But then distance learning started, and my brain’s available bandwidth plummeted, and I could not handle reading a nonfiction book about my emotions.

Last week, I finally bought the audio version and started listening. I am so grateful I did.

When it comes to emotions, I feel like an idiot. But the concept of emotional intelligence was not introduced to the scientific literature until 1990! Emotional intelligence is a relatively new concept. I am not at all late to the feelings party.

Brackett’s goal is to teach the reader to be an emotions scientist. Humans have evolved to be emotions scientists. Emotions are one of the things that make us so very human. But there are skills we need to learn in order to be an emotions scientist, and most of us have not had the opportunity to learn those skills.

This is my work: to learn the skills I need to become an emotions scientist.