Self knowledge and emotional awareness

For the first time, I actually yelled back at her. I remember feeling horrible about it, but not being able to hold back anymore. It took some real courage to let loose and not hold my feelings back.

In upper secondary school, I was in a special math group. A group of people from our school were selected to have one lesson with a gymnasium in town in order to get challenged and stimulated, together with people from all around town. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, going from being able to cruise through math class and still be top of the class, to be put in a room with 50 other people who seemed to be a lot smarter than I.

Quite soon, the first member of the group from my school dropped off. Then the second. And the third. Finally, only me and my girlfriend at the time were left. She was talking about dropping the class a lot, as we weren’t going to be able to use it in the school context. We still had to do the same things as the others in our regular math class, and the performance there was going to be the foundation for our grades. Her goal was set on getting a good grade, and I was just curious in general with maths.

One week, we had an extra class for the advanced maths class. We decided not to go there for some reason, since we were both unsure if we were going to keep the class at all. When I got home, I told mom that we didn’t go, and she was furious. We got in to an argument, and I didn’t feel like she was listening to me at all. As arguments go, it got more and more tense, and finally I had enough.

I started yelling. It was the first time I did so, as I usually just budged and let it go. This time somehow was different, mostly because of the feelings I had towards the advanced maths class. Added to that, I didn’t feel like mom listened to me.

It turned out to be a complete misunderstanding, which we only found out after I’d stormed off to my room to cool down and then come back to have a civil conversation about the matter. She hadn’t got that the class we skipped was an extra study hour they’d put in to help us, not a regular class. I probably hadn’t been clear about that.

Anyhow, the macro perspective on the argument to me is really interesting today. We both knew that I at the time had a really hard time coping with strong feelings. It’s still something I struggle with. When feeling a strong emotion of any kind, I tend to go on lockdown. I’m more aware of it now than I was at the time. The only sound thing for me to do when feeling those kinds of emotions is to take a step back and take some time with it.

Regardless of the situation or the problem I’m facing, I need to take time with it. At times a lot more time than others.

Now, that’s not easy all the time. It requires a lot of emotional awareness and acting on that awareness. At any given time, I need to be aware of what I’m feeling and acknowledge the processes I need to go through in order to be able to act from a positive inner space. When the emotion isn’t as strong, or when there’s only one situation to focus on, that’s a lot easier. But when there are multiple things going on at the same time it gets a lot harder.

Last week was really stressful for me overall. I had about four or five of these emotionally charged problems which seemed huge to me. Two of them, I could just attack head on, but being in it, I now realise it was all too much for me to handle. So in some of them I just locked down completely, feeling a lot of anxiety.

The emotional awareness was in place, I knew that I felt very strongly about all of them. But the actions and reactions to those emotions weren’t the proper ones. I really would’ve needed to just pause some of them, in order to get my mind and body straight and be able to operate from that sound space where I can use my full catalogue of problem solving skills.

There are loads of things to do to enhance your emotional awareness, and they’ve all got to do with improving self knowledge. Writing this text is one thing. Writing a short manifesto or checklist for emotionally charged problems that you take to in these situations is another.

What’s important is to learn from the mistakes. To take a look at them afterwards and break them up. That’s how you learn and evolve from hardships.