How to Be Human by Jory Fleming

Author:Jory Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Talking about Other People’s Emotions:

Jory is extremely conscious of his own struggles with emotional awareness and responses.

He is deeply concerned about inadvertently hurting someone else or causing pain because he has not picked up on their words or nonverbal signals and thus has not responded appropriately. He worries about and tries to watch every word that he speaks. And this from a young man who at the start of his life could hardly speak at all.

Listening to him, I was repeatedly struck by the deep burden and responsibility he feels to not injure other people’s emotional well-being. Jory’s various references to his own inadequacies—“I’m bad at”—made me want to interrupt him to apologize for everyone who has ever made him feel that he is somehow a lesser person or has forced upon him a custodial role for other people’s feelings.

On his own, Jory has developed a very unique way to compensate for some of his emotional intelligence shortcomings. He read a manual that most people would probably largely ignore. As he says, “Who knows how much of the world’s knowledge is locked up in manuals that nobody’s thought to read?”

LW: Pull out some Jory beads and give me a picture of how you envision other people’s emotions, how they appear to you, and how you pick up on them.

JORY: I don’t think emotions are always linked to fragility; they can sometimes be linked to strength. I’d envision it like walking down a sidewalk where most of it is pavement. But occasionally there are some eggshells and rocks that are the same color as the pavement. If you step on the rocks, you think, Ow, but that’s because of somebody’s emotional strength that you are not expecting. And if you step on the eggshells, they break. I like that image because if I’m looking at the sidewalk, it can be difficult, if the rocks and the eggshells are the same color, to pick out which one is where as I walk.

A more explicit emotion is easier for me to pick up on than implicit emotion. If somebody is feeling down or anxious or something like that, they may say something which most people would pick up on. But if they did not literally say “I’m feeling anxious,” I might not pick up on that feeling. Or I would misinterpret it. If someone who is super stressed-out studying for exams says, “I haven’t been sleeping well,” I may not connect it. If I’m reminded that it’s exam period, then I’ll be like oh, they were feeling anxious and that’s why they couldn’t sleep.

Most people don’t explicitly display anxiety, or if they do, it’s really subtle. I was having breakfast with a music major, and he had a recital later in the day. Toward the end of our conversation, he mentioned that he was feeling nervous about the day ahead. Once he said that explicitly, it made me connect other things that I hadn’t picked up on before but were now more easily noticeable, like he was drinking copious amounts of water.

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