Emotional literacy, according to Claude Steiner, is “the ability to understand your emotions, listen to others and empathise with their emotions, and to express emotions productively.” In the same fashion, for me to consider myself to be emotionally literate is being able to cope with feelings and emotions in ways that can eventually help me help yourself and those around me. And oddly enough, I was only able to reach my current point in my literacy because of a whole separate person and a whole separate literacy.
When I started my 8th grade year, I noticed a shift in my emotional stability. Finding myself no longer capable of appropriately translating my thoughts to those they were directed at, I stopped sharing all together for the better …show more content…
I was homeschooled for the first three years of high school and around my third year I found myself infatuated with the ideologies behind equality and intersectional feminism. During that time, I read a lot of articles about emotionally manipulative and very toxic friendships looking for some sort of internal validation so I could find even more reasons to victimize myself and, to my surprise, found myself to be the abuser. It was a complete and total reality check and I knew something had to change, fast. But instead of taking that as start to mending those I’d hurt, I turned on myself. I was the villain and there was never anything wrong with anyone else but me. I wasn’t making my way toward stability, I was hating myself to the point of a total metaphysical shutdown. Though I had gone my entire year making amends with everyone I possibly could, I ended my junior year and started my senior with one thing in mind; I was a …show more content…
It was nowhere near overnight and we still struggle to this day, but we’re getting better everyday. And with that my literacy grew because frankly, anybody can write. Anybody can relive situations, anybody can write out a situation they’ve never experienced. Anybody can create a world of mixed feelings and the monsters they create, but it’s something else to face those monsters in real life and take them down. Whether it’s someone you love, hate, or whether it’s you. Everyone needs to be able to understand and cope with the world around them, everybody needs to feel heard. My writing went from my own personal pity party, to true attempts at understanding emotions that weren’t just my own. My writing was the foundation of a whole new literacy I never realized I desperately
When I started my 8th grade year, I noticed a shift in my emotional stability. Finding myself no longer capable of appropriately translating my thoughts to those they were directed at, I stopped sharing all together for the better …show more content…
I was homeschooled for the first three years of high school and around my third year I found myself infatuated with the ideologies behind equality and intersectional feminism. During that time, I read a lot of articles about emotionally manipulative and very toxic friendships looking for some sort of internal validation so I could find even more reasons to victimize myself and, to my surprise, found myself to be the abuser. It was a complete and total reality check and I knew something had to change, fast. But instead of taking that as start to mending those I’d hurt, I turned on myself. I was the villain and there was never anything wrong with anyone else but me. I wasn’t making my way toward stability, I was hating myself to the point of a total metaphysical shutdown. Though I had gone my entire year making amends with everyone I possibly could, I ended my junior year and started my senior with one thing in mind; I was a …show more content…
It was nowhere near overnight and we still struggle to this day, but we’re getting better everyday. And with that my literacy grew because frankly, anybody can write. Anybody can relive situations, anybody can write out a situation they’ve never experienced. Anybody can create a world of mixed feelings and the monsters they create, but it’s something else to face those monsters in real life and take them down. Whether it’s someone you love, hate, or whether it’s you. Everyone needs to be able to understand and cope with the world around them, everybody needs to feel heard. My writing went from my own personal pity party, to true attempts at understanding emotions that weren’t just my own. My writing was the foundation of a whole new literacy I never realized I desperately