emotional labor – Yvet Youssef

This one is dedicated to the moon in Cancer, where it’s stationed on my birth chart, and where it’s fully lit up today, January 13th, 2025. Written last Summer, when, now that I think of it… the sun was also in Cancer. It’s clearly a theme. Emotive water signatures, ruining uncomfortable and performative parties since the dawn of time…

Sometimes water pours from my eyes involuntarily and I look for its source in my body but can’t find it anywhere inside of me. Then I look at your face, and your dry eyes, cheeks that haven’t been watered for ages, and realize these tears are yours.

I used to cry every day going to school in the morning as a kid. An early mourning ritual. I don’t know how my mom did it. There’s VCR tapes from the 90’s where I’m balling my eyes out amongst the flower girls at a wedding. On the surface it looks like I’m the one ruining the atmosphere, but I think I was just the weather girl. Picking up unspoken currents from the ether. Confused by the discrepancies between what I sensed and how things appeared to be. I cried at parties. During vacations with friends. Cried myself to sleep imagining my parents being kidnapped downstairs. I cried in church. In the supermarket. On my bicycle. Hiding in toilet stalls.

In my early thirties there were a few years where I cried every single consecutive day. If there had been an app for that I would have gotten a record level tear-streak. It was a perpetual heartbreak carousel that just kept on spinning. A mixture of my own tears and the ungrieved pain of others. Like I was channeling the sadness of everyone that couldn’t. And there was so much of it waiting in line to be processed during those purging years, it often felt like trying to drain a bottomless well.

High sensitivity, they say. “She just feels everything very strongly.” And it’s alright with me, you know. I rarely feel embarrassed about it anymore. Just sometimes a little awkward when I try to be as confidently aloof as my company, but can’t, for the life of me, muster the same level of coolness.

“You are better off,” he says, “you don’t have to live with all of these repressed emotions.” I pause for a moment. But. I do… You see? I am living with your repressed emotions. We all are. Everything you do not feel ends up pouring down someone else’s face. This is just the physics of interdependence. And maybe I’m a canary in that coal mine. “Ugh, she’s tearing up again… must be approaching a dense and uncharted psychic atmosphere, do we back-out of here, or unpack this shit?” If you push your pain down it inevitably rises up somewhere else, and often with the people you love most. I’ve lived a life working overtime processing everyone’s unmet grief in the room. Underpaid. Very few benefits.

I would not oppose a motion to establish a more equal division of emotional labor.

Tear up to capacity

At the altar of our liberation

Behold this glass bowl shrine

Filled with liquid sacrifice

And leap beyond what limits you

To offer water from your eyes

* I want to acknowledge that facing repressed emotions can seem absolutely terrifying sometimes AND point out there there are containers where you can be witnessed and supported in that process. It’s the work I do with people in Clarity Sessions, and the work many others do in therapeutic spaces. It’s possible. And it makes a difference.

* I thought I stole the line “leap beyond what limits you” from a Rilke poem, but found I merely paraphrased it: see an improperly spaced version of the poem here.

* The sound I can’t help thinking about with that last line: here

* The playlist that I listened to as I was writing this last Summer: here

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

– James Baldwin

If I love you, I don’t want you to be stuck, I want you to grow. If I love you, I don’t want to get stuck, I want to grow with you, for you, for all of us. To me the very purpose of being in a relationship is to grow with someone. I have no interest in tranquility if it is housed on a gurgling cesspool of unconscious dysfunctional behavioral patterns. Such tranquility is a farce, it is not real, it is not peaceful. Peace can only ever arise from making conscious that which hides in the shadows of our being. Carl G. Jung referred to this as shadow work. And it is precisely in (conscious, self-reflective) partnership with another person that such work is particularly feasible. Why? Because when I see you – truly see you – day in day out, and if I am the slightest bit aware, those shadows of yours are going to announce themselves to me sooner or later. We all have them. In this inevitable process I will feel those shadows hurled at me with sharp clarity, at which point I can say: “Hey, you! Look at this. Here’s something to dig into because it hurts me and others”. And you, dear one, can do the same for me: “Your behavior is painful to me, let’s address what is happening here”.

And guess what happens through this type of relational labor? Peace happens. Peace happens within the awareness of the chaos. Peace happens within the acknowledgment of the pain. The moment we are conscious of our destructive and dysfunctional behavior, is the moment we can heal it, is the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief. That is what it means to me to be in a loving relationship; to trust someone to respectfully call out my bullshit because that person cares about me enough to see me do better. If we can lovingly do that for each other, Love will continue to grow, intimacy will continue to deepen, life will expand in richness and in meaning. To Love you is to see you and to support you in becoming the best possible version of yourself, which in turn helps me become the best possible version of myself. Such Love is evolutionarily, reciprocal, and regenerative.

Unfortunately, we are collectively pretty terrified of being uncomfortable. And if one thing can be said about shadow work: It is ridiculously uncomfortable. However, dismissing discomfort is much like closing the curtains to life. We have been duped by the sugary platitude of “Happily Ever After” to buy into the false idea that relationships are there to make us happy. As if it’s even possible to affix a transitory emotional state to a lifetime of perpetual changes. Philosophically we can likely agree that it is questionable whether it’s even possible to gain happiness through external acquisition. There is surely a correlation between wellbeing and having our basic human needs met, but there is a limit to how much joy can be derived from external goods and services. If happiness is an inside job, it should come to no surprise your new fling isn’t gonna give it to you. Yet in the realm of relationship we seem so addicted to this infantile storyline: “Godspeed ye innocent lovebirds carried into the distance on a sparkling carriage just smiling happily and chugging along ad infinitum towards an elusive horizon! Your coupling grants you entrance to the ranks of well-adjusted extras in a lifelong Colgate commercial!” Not only does it sound boring AF, it’s delusional as all hell. This is not fucking Pleasant Ville, you’ve got a life to live, buddy.

We are humans, we die, we lose loved ones, we meet sickness, misfortune, we grieve, we fail, we fall apart, we are wrong sometimes. Sometimes we are wrong a lot. Try to smile through that. Happy yet? What’s that? You are telling me you can’t sustain that radiant smile of yours for all of eternity? Is the denial starting to hurt? Is it beginning to feel weird? You see, I am not in this life to witness a staged performance of perpetual happiness. To be clear, I have nothing against ‘happy’ as an experience. Bless ‘happy’. I just believe we have been misguided to measure our success in life, as well as our sense of worth, on how long we can sustain a state of happiness. But happiness is not an achievement you lock into for life, it is a gift, and it arrives on our doorstep naturally when we align with our essence and learn against all odds to love ourselves fiercely and deeply. The only way we can love ourselves deeply is through a systematic dismantling of all of the places where we are in denial and full of shit. And yes, indeed, we can lovingly see each other through such a process*.

So, in lieu of a feigned smile, please give me your pain, your struggles, and your mistakes. Let’s work through the reality, the grit, the rawness, the really disturbing shadow of it all. Allow me to love you entirely and let’s be real about all the places where we have more work to do. Let’s dance through the truth of our humanness together. Let’s marvel at the messes we’ve made. Let’s shake our heads really hard. Let’s sit for a moment in how much it hurts. Breathe through it. That’s where freedom and laughter simply come to greet us on their own accord. It is such a glorious relief to surrender to the realness of it all. I am in this life for the remarkable joy of “Evolving Ever After,” instead.

* For the record, I am speaking from a perspective of personal relationships here, but this very same process holds true for our collective struggles as well. From the micro to the macro – everything is connected. James Baldwin has written extensively on the role of truth-telling in relation to racism and other injustices in our societies. True patriotism – the love for a country – thus resides in the people who dare to shine light on the horrible shadows of our nations, because only through such labor can we even start to imagine peace. Healing can only begin when we uncover the festering wounds of our collective past and present and start scooping the puss out. No, it isn’t pretty, but it is what Love does when it cares about something.

Tag: emotional labor

Tear up to capacity at the altar of our limitations

Love and Shadow Work