No More Evicted Emotions: I Now Let Them Move In With Me

We now co-exist together

How I practice emotional noting. A woman on her laptop with a ghost in the background. Image generated with Adobe Express.

I used to run away from my negative emotions. I tried to push them away because I couldn’t bear feeling them. I now live with them.

The technique I use, in meditation practice, is called “noting” and it can be applied to multiple things.

Basically, what I do, is letting my emotions exist side by side with me. Like the cat that sits on your lap or desk while you work.

I acknowledge their existence, they can be annoying sometimes, but I try not to let them affect me too much.

I just pet them from time to time and move on.

Need an example? Here it is…

I am quite lucky I managed to find a job that only requires me to be in person in the office twice every two weeks. Mix and match however you please. 

So I usually go in on Tuesdays, when we have most of our team meetings.

But before we went to bed on Monday night, I could tell my little one had a fever and the need to be very close to me every single second. 

I wasn’t feeling so good either, and having taken a couple of vaccines that day probably didn’t help.

As the night went on, things got more difficult.

My poor little monster woke up every 30 minutes in pain, Tylenol was just minimally helping.

She had a cough, chest congestion, fever… and she is teething.

And every time she woke up, she needed to be breastfed. 

By 6 am, when the alarm went off, I had barely slept.

My whole body aching, probably with a fever myself.

It’s Thanksgiving in a couple of days. 

Since COVID I have this reasonable fear of getting immunocompromised people or their immediate family and friends sick. 

To me, the take-home message from all that Pandemic madness was: if you’re not feeling well, work from home. Don’t get anyone killed. 

And I take it to a “T”. I have canceled plans I was looking forward to if I have felt sick for this reason.

So it was a no-brainer, I needed to ask for a situational telework day, which is when you stay home a day you’re supposed to go to the office.

And I know I did the right thing, but…

Kids get sick too often, and the same thing happened 3 weeks ago.

It took me hours to craft an email to my boss, apologizing for the incident. Writing and deleting.

I have never stayed home because “I didn’t feel like going to the office.” Yet, I feared I could be seen as abusing the system, not dedicated enough.

Now, what did I do to cope with that feeling? Well, I just let the feeling exist.

I know myself too well. No amount of journaling will help me ease the unreasonable fear that they may take this against me in the future. 

That’s how my brain works. I can’t ever fail, even when failing is built in the circumstances, not my attitude. 

So yes, I put that feeling on the side, but at arms reach, and went on with my workday duties while teleworking. While my toddler was taken care of by our amazing babysitter. 

I will probably bring this up to my manager in the near future, and he will probably tell me that he’s not bothered at all. 

And eventually, this uncomfortable feeling will sink in the bottom of the ocean, together with that stupid thing I did in 5th grade. 

These two feelings will wait to resurface together at 3.37 am in the morning the day before an important meeting two years and three months from now.

But at least, I won’t be surprised.