Day 26 I [Heart] NY; or, Emotional Continence

Somehow I disappeared Day 26 when I published Day 27. The miracle of modern technology, and operator error. Sorry for the duplication!

In a Letter to the Editor this morning, its Warwick, New York-based author says, “Coronavirus is catastrophic, but it opens a new path.” She’s referring to different choices humanity could continue to make to help slow climate change. I’d like to consider her idea in a different context.

Now, how do you feel?
It’s a multiple choice test.
Choose one.
Mad? Bad? Sad? Glad?

When 9.11 happened, New York City became, in an instant, America’s darling.

Ask again. Mad? Bad? Sad? Glad? [My answer: Glad.]

The City stood for what made America great.

Ask again. [Glad.]

During the coronavirus pandemic, New York is one in a long, I might even say, honorable line of scapegoats promulgated by the federal government.

Again. [Mad.]

Another article noted, “There’s a long history of scapegoating New York City for problems that have their roots far beyond the Hudson.”

Again. [Sad.]

I was appalled to see this: “On Twitter, Covid-19 has taken on a new sobriquet: the ‘Cuomovirus.’”

Again. [Bad.]

One of the headlines in the Outbreak aggregator read, “White House warns that the week ahead will be full of sadness as U.S. death toll approaches 10,000.”

It’s not a surprising projection. Of course, we’ll be sad. The question is whose sadness is it?

I have, for many, many years, maintained that there are only four emotions. If they don’t rhyme, they don’t count. (It only works in English.)

Mad. Bad. Sad. Glad.

All the rest of the words we use for emotions are intellectual variations.

Before you dismiss my thesis as too simplistic, hear me out. What I mean is that all emotion can be reduced to these four rhyming feelings at their basest levels.

If we take just one of these, say, Mad, and look at the other words, you’ll see what I mean. Consider these: angry, pissed, ticked, irritated, frustrated, annoyed, infuriated, enraged, outraged, furious, irate, fuming, seething, raging, wrathful, cross, indignant, exasperated, livid, beside myself. There are more idioms, but let’s stop here.

There’s a reason I reduce emotions to their simplest expression. It’s because they’re easier to deal with when we do.

So, yeah, it’s very likely we’ll be sad this week as the death toll mounts. The issue isn’t whether or not the feeling will happen. It’s several-fold from its existence.

First, are you feeling personally sad?

Personal sadness over loss is different from collective sadness.
It’s also different from empathy you might feel over someone else’s loss that doesn’t touch you quite so personally.
It’s different again from family sadness at loss, too.
Not to mention neighborhood sadness at a loss.
Or countrywide mourning because of loss.
Planetary sadness due to loss.
And universal sadness from loss.

That’s seven levels of sad right there.

Lately, my husband and I have begun to use the words emotional continence to indicate the rare skill of acknowledging, owning, and managing one’s own emotions.

Westerners aren’t great at that. If we were, we wouldn’t be so addicted to blame. Basically, the buck stops with you when it comes to your own emotions.

Julianne Smith, a former security adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden, said, “[T]his is a slowly rolling crisis that affects different parts of the country and the society at different speeds. So we’re not united as a country.”

We know this intellectually, but on the emotional front, we’re having a harder time with it. Blaming New York City because it’s an epicenter of the virus—for now—is symptomatic of this dearth of emotional continence. It’s also the implication that if we could isolate the Big Apple, no one else would be infected.

This is a belief that walls will solve the problem. There’s not a wall ever made that can stop this tiny pathogen. And because of that, there are no emotional walls we can erect so that we are not affected by the virus.

Which is why we need to take some of this self-quarantine to do our own emotional homework. No one else can do it for you. Never could. Never will. Emotion is an inside job.

And that’s why my four rhyming words are helpful.

You saw the gamut of emotions that I ran just during the time I was writing this piece. We’re all doing that, Beloved. All the time.

Figuring out what your reactive emotions are is helped by the four words. If you can name just the baseline of feeling, you can make choices about how, when, where, or if to express it. If, on the other hand, you cannot, you’ll feel like the Narcissist-in-Chief looks to us on most days. Like you’re holding onto the bottom of a pendulum, or the tail of a tiger, and swinging like a demented Tarzan or a delusional Jane.

Jennifer Senior, writing in “This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis,” paints a terrorizing Dorian Gray of a portrait. Here’s part of her screed.

“Trump is genuinely afraid to lead. He can’t bring himself to make robust use of the Defense Production Act, because the buck would stop with him. (To this day, he insists states should be acquiring their own ventilators.) When asked about delays in testing, he said, ‘I don’t take responsibility at all.’”

We cannot afford to follow his Terrible Warning, Beloved.

Now is the time to do our emotional work. Sit with yourself and your emotions. Ask questions. Get to the bottom of your feels, as the kids say today. Then you’ll be able to gracefully own what’s yours, what’s not, and, as an added bonus, you’ll be able to help others sort out their feelings too.

So yes, what’s happening is sad, and it’s also an opportunity to dig deep, just like we New Yorkers did during 9.11 when New York City stood for what made American great in its inception, continues to make it great now, and will make it great in the future.

The word you’re looking for here is Resilience.

Or, we could also say,

Yes, we have.
Yes, we can.
Yes, we are.
Yes, we will.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

If you have friends that would benefit by reading my words,
please feel free to forward this missive in its entirety.

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