The elevator door opens and your body lights up. Maybe your stomach drops, something tightens, you stop for a second and feel yourself pull back. You haven’t had time to figure out why. There’s a man on the elevator and something in you doesn’t want to get on. What happens next? Because for a lot of us, we don’t go further into what we just felt. We go straight to whether we have a good enough reason to feel it. He hasn’t done anything. He looks perfectly normal. Maybe I’m overreacting. What if I’m judging him? What if he thinks it’s because of him? We move from something happening in our own body to managing the experience of a person we don’t even know.
Can you just wait for the next elevator? You don’t have to know the man is dangerous or even know anything about him. Something happened in your body. That part is true. Why is there so little room to stay there before deciding we probably got it wrong?
Our bodies are taking in information all the time that we aren’t consciously tracking. Movement, proximity, facial expression, changes in sound and what is happening around us. The nervous system can respond before we have language for what it is responding to. It can also respond because something happening now, is connected to something in the past. Fear doesn’t arrive notifying us which one it is.
We miss how quickly we outsource this activity. We feel something and then look outside ourselves to find out whether the feeling is legitimate. Is there enough evidence? Would someone else think this was weird? Am I being fair? Am I being dramatic? And the good girl has been training for this shit forever. Don’t offend. Don’t embarrass someone. Don’t make it awkward. Don’t assume something bad about another person. Be nice. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Make sure everyone else is okay, and then maybe we can circle back and see how you’re doing.
Never mind ourselves. We’re always last.
We talk about losing touch with intuition as though the signal stopped coming. Some of us are getting the signal and have become incredibly fast at dropping it? The body does something and before we have stayed with it for even a few seconds, we are explaining it away, correcting it, making it more reasonable, checking it against everyone else in the room. How would we ever learn the language of our own body if we keep asking everyone else to translate it?
Going back in doesn’t mean deciding the feeling was correct. It means going back in. What happened in my body when those doors opened? What happened when I decided I should get on anyway? What happens if I decide I’m waiting for the next one? Does anything change? Does the feeling get louder, quieter, move somewhere else? What else did I notice that I didn’t know I noticed? Maybe there is something there. Maybe there isn’t. We don’t have to make it nice again quite so quickly.
The elevator is easy because the cost is thirty seconds. What about when the cost is bigger? When leaving would be obvious. When saying no would disappoint someone. When changing your mind would require an explanation. When everyone else seems perfectly comfortable and you’re the only one whose body is doing something. When there isn’t another elevator coming in thirty seconds. How much proof do you require then? Who do you ask whether what you’re feeling is real? What happens when they don’t agree with you? And when did their agreement become part of how you know?