Learning to feel once again
14 October 2026 - 1,369 words
Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves―along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. (Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury)
I pull this quote because there is no one who understood the true face of intellectualism like Audre Lorde. There is no one who actually knew what intellectualism looked like, sounded like, echoed, like Audre Lorde. There is no one who knew what knowledge actually feels like, as opposed to what it thinks like, like her. I say there is no one because there are in fact countless numbers of us. I say there is no one because there is only all of us, who already know this. Yet she found the courage to embody this knowledge and found the words to speak it.
This piece is about intellectualism, and its destructive nature.
I found this following quote after having a thought and searching it, to see who else thought it. It turns out, someone’s already been recorded as saying it.
Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop? (William Stafford)
We all know how to feel, but many of us are trained to stop feeling. I feel this is probably one of the most destructive parts of any of our society. Men are trained to not feel, so they can go on and be rather effective enslavers, husbands, fathers, owners, managers, presidents, kings, etc. Notice how all of these words flow into each other with ease. These are things that are not meant to feel.
The intellectual, the academic, the professor, too, should not feel. In one of my anthropology classes today, we learned about some Lacanian anthropologist who said that, like the pyschoanalyst who must learn to distance themselves from their desire, who must learn to minimize their social position in psychiatry, the anthropologist/ethnographer too, must learn to not feel, to not impugn their objects of study with their own desire. From the time you write your first essay, you are trained over and over again to distance yourself from your writing. What it is that we are told? “Never use first person, never refer to yourself, always write from a third person perspective.” This is the most important principle of any serious writing―do not imbue the ink with your feelings. Do not bleed onto the page.
We have to be taught this, because, as Lorde and Stafford both are well aware, we are all poets at heart. We first know how to connect the pen to our heart, and we must be taught to sever that connection, and draw it from the brain, instead. And we believe that this is what makes us more trustworthy, or accurate.
I’ve learned to do this. Perhaps learned is too soft of a word, actually. I’ve trained myself to do this. I’ve been trained to do this. When I was a kid, I was always commended for my writing. Especially my argumentative writing. But any time I had to become personal with the text, especially in a narrative, I lost my sauce. It sucked. Because the thing that I once knew more intimately than anything else, my heart, was on the precipice of life and death.
For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. (Lorde)
Academia trains you to intellectualize. To organize the world and your experience into very orderly ideas that flow into one another with ease, well-structured and conclusive. Always start with an introduction and end with a conclusion. Always go somewhere. I am expected to take my feelings about the world, to take, my thoughts, and cut them up so that they fit cleanly together. I am expected to procure a shape from the disgustingly irregular object that my heart is. And that’s what intelligence is, that’s what wisdom is. A clever person is one who can destroy themselves enough to make their ideas clear to an unfeeling recipient.
Writing about race is encouraged to be easily understandable by an unsympathetic white audience who cares little for thinking about race; writing about gender should be acceptable and plain to someone who feels little for gender; writing about class, obviously, should be orientated towards those who have never gone hungry. Because god forbid you develop anger or rage or sympathy or sadness or regret about such things. God forbid you feel anything at all. God forbid you start feeling things about injustice, otherwise you’re just a whiny bitch, or a crybaby, or that friend who’s too woke. Or maybe feeling is good, as long as you still do the assignment, still finish the essay, still churn out that paper for your advisor, still present at that conference, as long as you still render your ideas intelligible to an unfeeling, unmoved, academic audience.
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us―the poet―whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. (Lorde)
I want to kill the intellectual inside my head. I want to kill the voice that speaks intellectually. I want to kill the creature in my head feasting on my feelings and returning only thoughts. The intellectual, for me, speaks through my head, through my mouth, through my lips, with a disembodied, masculine, voice. Through its speech I am decayed, dismayed, destroyed. Through its speech I find myself falling farther from my heart. “Theory is liberatory”―bullshit. You know what is liberatory? Hugs. Knowing that you are loved, and that you love in return. Genuine conversation not filtered through a lens of intellectualism and anxiety and shame but actually speaking as myself. And that sounds so stupid to me because the intellectual in my head has such a grip on me. And I want nothing more than to throw it back into the face of “the white fathers,” and let them be devoured by it.
There are only new ways of making [old ideas] felt ― of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead―while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. (Lorde)
And as I sit here by the open window, listening to the breeze, listening to a biker ride by, staring into the leaves of the trees blocking the view of the city, I look back into my past, into the intellectual I once was, and I can find only trauma. For me, intellectualism has been born of trauma. It was a useful role, to allow myself to dissociate into my own mind, and find some kind of thoughtful peace there. But every second I stay in there, I burn away the corners of myself to fit it cleanly into a story. And I realize, it’s only by coming out, by leaving that world behind, that I can find myself.