Where The Feels Hide
How do I explain the displacement when one cannot feel emotions directly?
Because I do experience intense emotional reactions, but I have a tendency to interpret those emotions as if coming from the atmosphere. I can walk through them. I feel them talking to my nervous system.
I eventually discovered the word for this. Read about it in my article about projecting.
Everyone projects their feelings. No one is capable of seeing past the tip of their own nose. Meaning,
Every perception you have of a situation or person is limited by your level of understanding, and through a necessary process of interpretation, done through the primary senses as the medium shaping your experience.
If one has trouble identifying emotions through the social lens, those emotions land more prominently on a different object. And land on something they will. There is no getting around this.
Shapes Are a Tool for Identifying Emotions
Separated from the social realm, I project not onto people so much as I do the geometric world I sense through patterns. Not patterns in human behavior, but patterns noticed in my environment.
I’ve written about this, but I’ll reiterate here: I do not notice your social cues. My attention is set to the lines and patterns in the buildings and their shadows. It is easier for me to connect to lines and inanimate objects.
Or trees. I feel oneness with trees.
The shapes of architecture, trees, and their shadows captivate. I suspect my mind is so attuned to these patterns that I learned to correlate emotional resonance to the angles formed by branches.
The doctor who conducted my assessment prompted me to describe feelings such as grief and love.
I described grief as a string of circles running down my spine with the same low and depressing hum of the refrigerator- a distinct falling sensation in my nervous system.
I described love as a bounce rather than the endless falling of grief.
Grief and love have become a circle for my understanding. Assigning meaning to everything, pointing to their shapes and tone, I experience whatever the emotion as a location disrupted, unbalanced.
Numbers are shapes as well. This made math difficult, as Western schools teach students to examine the topic from its parameters. We measure around, rather than resonate with the object of study. How bizarre.
When I solve a math problem, I am balancing the weight of the shapes to reach my conclusion. I thought some of you might get it ;)
Metaphors Help
Humans learn and process through reflection. Productive reflection takes place in the form of relationships acting as a mirror providing feedback.
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So, how do we gain understanding when we have trouble connecting- trouble relating and communicating per society’s norms?
A few years ago, I began using automatic writing to help me process change. I was newly sober and needed to find a suitable way to integrate my emotions since I no longer dulled my senses with alcohol.
I used this technique to tap into my subconscious and heightened perception, too. What I found surprised me.
Excerpts from NEW CALIFORNIA (dancing girl press) 2025
“…extremities jabbing at anything in reach. If I could reach the highway, I’d claw at that black and blue. The streetlights make time move inward. If we weren’t moving, the light burned my exposed — everything is exposed. In artificial waves, rolling from heated lamps, even blades of grass melt.”
Or,
“The bobcat crossed the street moments after my disabled client and I secured our safety in my vehicle. This was, at that moment, his street and not a nature center parking lot... Feeling the urge to reach out as a tickle (awareness) on the curvature of the neck, the atmosphere becomes brighter, compressed, and expanded.
As though the eyes are pulled from their sockets. Perhaps so the bobcat can see us better. Blood can slow in still frames within this expansion. Pores seep faster. Diagnostics run benign. The other kind of love.”
Here, I described how the senses interact with the emotional body through undulating currents that move between forms. Throwing in a little space-time interference, I noticed the space between every form is more important than the forms affected.
The blades of grass and the tiny hairs on your neck stand at full attention, moved by some external force, as though they, too, require a mirror.
Or
I am merely projecting and feeling the feels as though in some mysterious (out there) form. Projection is unavoidable, but also a tool.
These poems were written without thinking. And without edits to avoid losing a meaning I myself could not discern.
How is that benign reaction, blood slowing in still frames, another kind of love? I think I’ve misplaced my love somewhere. I must have set it down, and knowing me, I forgot where I left it.
I leave remnants of myself everywhere. So do you.
That’s all I wanted to share. Our energetic imprints, left out in the streets, are viscerally felt pockets of space we create without knowing.
We cast out shadows of our being to analyze their shape and form.
We call the sudden swells, waves of emotion. Perhaps it is not that far-fetched to think I can interpret them through my nerves as shapes felt.
Thinking about the emotional currents in the air and what it means to have the ability to perceive them as objects for play. What if this is the entire point of experiencing life in the corporeal?
This is how we are the creators.
How Exciting!. On Spinoza | by Britt Has Autism | Feb, 2026 | Medium
