My Emotions Are My Process: On Crying, Manipulation, and Being Left

My Emotions Are My Process: On Crying, Manipulation, and Being Left

Release becoming current. A heavy claymation portrait of overwhelm, pressure, and emotional movement flowing beyond the body.

My body speaks first. The emotion comes first. Then I integrate later.

I feel tings, deeply. 

This morning I realized something that I have probably known my entire life.

My emotions come first.

My body speaks first.

The emotion comes first.

Then I integrate later.

Or I integrate after the expression of emotion has subsided.

That is the order.

Not because I chose it.

Not because I am trying to be difficult.

Not because I am trying to manipulate anyone.

That is how I am wired.

Why are you crying?

I'll give you something to cry about? (while actively crying confusing AF)

Why are you behaving this way?

Why are you so emotional?

Why can’t you just calm down?

Why can’t you just explain what is happening?

The problem is that I often cannot explain what is happening yet.

The explanation comes later.

The meaning comes later.

The integration comes later.

The emotion comes first.

And what I am realizing is that what I have often called sabotage is actually integration.

Something happens.

A conversation occurs.

A realization begins moving through my body.

My productivity drops.

I get frustrated.

I cry.

I become angry.

I think I am off track.

Then later I realize that I was integrating something I did not yet have language for.

Yesterday it happened while I was editing an essay.

A conversation about workshops shifted something.

My spouse and I have been trying to figure out where we can do our work.

And suddenly I found myself realizing:

I don’t think I want to keep popping into new spaces because we’re being harmed and no one cares.

That realization stopped the work.

Not forever.

Just for the moment.

But my default system immediately labeled it sabotage.

Because that is what my default system does.

If I am not producing, something must be wrong.

If I am emotional, something must be wrong.

If I am crying, something must be wrong.

But what if nothing is wrong?

What if something is integrating?

What if the tears are part of the process?

What if the anger is part of the process?

What if the grief is part of the process?

What if my body is simply speaking in the language it has always spoken?

The harder realization is this:

People often think tears are manipulation.

Especially when they come from certain bodies.

I live in a Black body.

And that history matters.

Because the history of white women’s tears in this country sits right next to the history of Black people being denied emotional complexity altogether.

So I live inside a strange contradiction.

A white woman can cry publicly and people rush toward her.

People comfort her.

People protect her.

People assume her tears mean something.

But because it is me and because it is the body that I am housed within, I suddenly become a slave who’s trying to pull the wool over massa head.

I can’t have emotions.

I’m not supposed to.

I’m just a body that’s meant to work and to work and to work beyond exhaustion.

A body that performs.

A body that produces.

A body that survives.

Not a body that feels.

And that contradiction follows me everywhere.

Especially online.

Especially in public.

Especially in spaces where people do not know me but feel entitled to narrate me.

Recently a troll left a comment on one of my posts.

Not someone who follows me.

Not someone who engages with my work.

Not someone who contributes anything.

Someone who spends their time watching people.

Spying.

Monitoring.

Waiting.

And when I spoke honestly about workshops not happening, they appeared with bullying.

Not concern.

Not curiosity.

Not care.

Bullying.

And the thing is, this is not new.

This is the engagement social media repeatedly serves me.

This is the engagement that gets rewarded.

This is the engagement that gets circulated.

And after years of it, I think I finally understand why emotional expression feels so dangerous.

Not because of the emotions themselves.

Because of what follows them.

People always talk about the crying.

They rarely talk about what happens after.

I have been physically abused for showing emotion.

I have been yelled at for showing emotion.

I have had someone’s spit flying in my face because I was hurting.

I have been made responsible for other people’s discomfort with my pain.

I have been told to stop.

I have been told to calm down.

I have been told that my emotional expression was the problem.

No one asked what was hurting.

No one asked what the tears meant.

The tears became the crime.

And eventually you start expecting that.

You start expecting punishment.

You start expecting people to disappear.

You start expecting people to make your pain about themselves.

Which leads me to another realization.

The grief is actually deeper than I thought.

Because when I ask myself who is leaving, there is no one left.

And sometimes that’s when I begin to spiral.

Who’s leaving?

There’s no one left to go other than me.

Again, that is not a statement about wanting to disappear.

It is a statement about what happens when abandonment becomes architecture.

This image sits at the heart of the essay Gemini, Aries Cancer and directly connects here. What appears as disruption may actually be movement. What one generation attempts to contain, another may be required to release. Sometimes the body understands the pathway before the story does.

When enough people leave, enough people harm, enough people refuse to understand, eventually the question becomes:

Can I stay?

Can I stay with myself?

Can I stay through the tears?

Can I stay through the grief?

Can I stay through the anger?

Can I stay long enough for the meaning to arrive?

Because meaning always arrives.

Eventually.

The body speaks.

The emotion comes.

The tears arrive.

The anger moves.

Then the integration begins.

Then the understanding comes.

Then the next step reveals itself.

My emotions are not separate from my process.

They are my process.

And maybe what I am grieving is how much of my life was spent believing otherwise.

Cosmos Watershed

✺ ≋ Gemini → Aries ← Cancer: On Multiplicity, Lineage, and Becoming the Release

This essay sits alongside Gemini → Aries ← Cancer. If that piece explores release itself—the moment when expression can no longer be contained—this piece explores what happens after release arrives. Together they examine the relationship between emotional expression, lineage, misunderstanding, integration, and becoming the release.

My Emotions Are My Process: On Crying, Manipulation, and Being Left