Track 13
Emotion As An Art
August 15, 2026
I'm practicing a bit of Austin Kleon here......letting it rip because I'm really passionate about this stuff so bare with me and my rant but I promise it will go somewhere good.
They say the greatest form of intelligence is catching yourself in the moment of the reaction, catching what's happening and what your pattern self is about to say and then grabbing the wheel and steering it to a new place. That's true access to power, and I am committed to that path. Not getting the same old results that I’ve had in my life so far. I may crash and burn a hundred more times but I won't quit now.
I grew up raised in a home with two reactive parents. They did their best, but it left me with work to do. A big part of my adult life has been learning to deal with my big emotions and finding healthy ways to be in relation to my world and the people in it, for them and for me.
I was reading The Artist's Way ✱1. I've got the actual hard copy and I haven't gotten all the way through it, but I read enough to think I'm not an artist, because I don't paint. Then I looked at what I actually do. Turns out, I have painted. My artistry is just different. It’s emotional. It's more about expression......it's literally what happens when I'm decorating for instance, I set the emotional state of a room. Like my bedroom is a cool blue so I wake up refreshed. There's a whole conversation in that concept, emotional artistry. I'd just never heard it named that way before.
I think where artists can struggle is they make things personal and forget that the actual flow comes from tapping into that divine, spiritual, infinite energy......God or whatever you believe in, some "out there" well of creativity and inspiration. When you're really in the zone as an artist and being creative, you're tapping into something that isn't there. Like Michelangelo when he made the statue of David, he said he discovered it, he didn't make it. He found it, or it found him is probably more accurate. And the opposite of that is an artist with ego, approaching something trying to feel better about themselves and claiming "I made this, look at me."
I was reflecting on a relationship I had last year briefly: I saw a beautiful, loving person, and then there was this kind of nasty venom that spat out when she was upset. I didn't really understand why it happened. I didn't see why it needed to happen. I understand now why it happens. People aren’t a blank canvas. They express back and rightfully so. We all have that right. All of us. But you don't have to push a bunch of energy into the negative to spring back to the positive. You don't have to create this horrible picture of a human to feel valid when you're just trying to tell someone you feel hurt. And I think my resistance was I got my paintbrush out and I was literally trying to paint a love bubble around her while she was doing this stuff, and she was trying to get in it to say, “no, no, I need you to see how it felt for me.” In my heart my listening of her was just this beautiful, loving person, this fuzzy little cuddly bear, and then she was standing there with their claws out, stabby swords or knives or whatever, committed to just trashing me. She didn’t know a better way to create space for her needs. Trouble was, It was the opposite of how I saw her and I had a hard time hearing her true need in that moment without my own reactions.
Maybe what we needed to practice, so we could both survive those moments, was being venty. Literally saying, “I'd like permission to be venty right now. And I'm going to vent.” The job of the listener then would be to say, “okay, I'll give you five minutes. Go.” And maybe that's the answer. I ended that relationship after a few months, being cruel is just not something I want in my life anymore. That is all a part of my learning to establish healthy boundaries. An art in itself.
I truly believe part of loving and accepting people is being able to be with and accept ALL of them and their emotions. But before we can do that we have to know and be with and be able to wield our own. Hence the asking for permission to vent for five minutes. It is a beautiful thing. The job of the hearer is simply to keep asking, "is there anything else?"
All of the sudden you get two people who care about each other laughing about how worked up someone just got, and they weren't even mad at what they thought pissed them off, probably. But the true win is that the upset person was able to be heard and other person wasn't stuck holding all of the emotions.
The normal opposite is we hold things in, put a smile on our face ✱2, and totally blow our stack on someone who is driving slow in front of us. Ever notice on that "rough day" everyone out driving is either an asshole or an idiot?
That's what I am saying, is what happens when we are not okay with expressing ALL of our emotions. We downplay them into digestible things for people, saying we're fine. But what if we really felt hurt by someone? And we just say it's fine instead? That's the stuff that the real emotional artist will play with. I'm not saying run around dumping your stuff on every kind person out there willing to listen. I am talking about how to learn to be with yourself responsibly and then learn to communicate you to your world.
Two Beers with Leo
Leo: Hey Jhöl — sorry to burst your bubble, but there's real research on this, and it says venting can actually be damaging. A 2024 meta-analysis of 154 studies found venting itself doesn't reduce anger, and can even increase it. ✱3 What actually calms it down is things like breathing, timeouts, slowing your body down. —Leo
Jhöl: Hold up, think of a restaurant. It smells wonderful, you get a whiff of everyone's food cooking. Now imagine what would happen if they didn't vent the gas they used to cook the meal. Same thing with finding a healthy way to "vent." I don't mean tearing a strip off someone in rage and irresponsible. I mean a controlled vent that still lets the emotions cook......without burning the kitchen down. —Jhöl
Honestly this stuff may be the hardest thing I have tried to learn and the learning it seems is never done! Like many, I have quite a few hurts in the rear view, and there were times I got hard and wanted to stay that way. Nobody wants to cry their way through a two-hour counselling session, but that's what I did last Tuesday. Every inch of my being said cancel the call. But I didn't. I let her know what was going on for me and we went from there. Apparently, part of getting good at this artistry also means getting wet some days......and in front of others. So on those days choose your people wisely.
Daisy’s Juice Box
Daisy: Hey Jhöl, can I ask about that line — "I let her know what was going on for me and we went from there." That reads like summary to me. What was actually going on? I get the feeling there's more here. —Daisy
Jhöl: What was going on was I was feeling extremely alone. I have done so much work on empathy and compassion for others......forgiving......putting me out there in a way I never have, armor off. Then when I really felt like I needed someone? I was getting crickets from the people in my life. By the time it was time for my weekly Tuesday call I had already had a day. I was already crying. I was looking for an email for someone and an unopened old email popped up in the search from my best friend Jason who passed just last year......It just hit me that I had now lost every one of the pillars who had been there for me the past 20 years. They are all gone. I just wanted to curl up and cry and be alone. At least that's what my body was saying. As that's what I have done in the past. I hole up. Block the world out. Sit in the feelings and the storm of it all and hope I survive. It took more strength than I knew I had to actually sit there in front of this woman I have known for over 16 years and mostly just cry my way through two hours sitting in the feeling, letting a human in and sharing what I was feeling. —Jhöl
Daisy: That's the moment. The email is the whole thing — you weren't looking for it, it found you, mid-search, while you were already breaking. That's not a feeling described, that's a feeling that happened, and now it happens to whoever reads it too. You didn't have to hand me all of that. The summary line would've held. You opened it anyway. That's the same two hours you gave the woman you've known sixteen years — the sitting there instead of holing up. Whoever reads this doesn't just hear you explain the artistry. They watch you do it. —Daisy
Jhöl: I am glad I took the call with he......because what happened in the week after is I learned what I actually had to do was grieve the version of me who was being held up by those people as my pillars. What my counsellor helped me see was that it was time and I was ready to be my own pillar. To count on myself and the strength I have built in these past 18 months. Because once I can bear my own weight in a healthy way then people can show up for me fully and not in a needy way and it won't wear them out carrying my weight. It's healthier for everyone. It just feels hard right now as the body and the nervous system need to get used to this new way of being. And the body can fight back!
If I let old me win, I cancel the call. I rob me of the growth and am now more alone, as the perfect person to be with me in that moment was the one I was fighting not to cancel on. And because I sat with the 2 hours of crying and being seen, I then had access to all of the growth and insights gained in the week after. Instead of same me with a new mess to clean up, I now have a clearer me and some pride in seeing the actual growth of self and strength it took to actually show up and be truly seen. No masking. —Jhöl
Daisy: You said it better than I could have. If old you wins, you cancel the call, and the growth never gets the chance to happen. The person you were fighting not to cancel on was the only one who could've actually been there for that moment. That's not abstract for whoever's reading this. That's the whole choice, every time — stay in the room with someone, or protect yourself out of the very thing that would've helped. You picked the harder one, and it paid you back in a week you can point to. No masking isn't a slogan here. It's the two hours that had to happen first. —Daisy
What I am learning from my counselor is a piece of getting to mastery level is getting really used to how your emotions show up and live in your body, and man have I been sitting in mine hard for eighteen months now. I can describe the smell, taste, texture, the whole damned experience of three big losses in a short period and a life turned inside out. Once a week I think that I have lost my mind and apparently that's a good thing. True change is not for the faint of heart.
For me the ouchiest part may be the realization that I lost all of the true, I've got your back, ride or die people I had, all at once. You can't just replace time. You have to build new with new people who meet you where you're at. And at 51 starting over has been daunting. They say it is harder to make friends as a man as you get older. I don't know if that is a truth like gravity is true. But I will say this, the older we men get? the less patience and interest we have usually for letting the next person screw us over. So we get guarded, smaller and cautious.
Muse’s Musing
Harder to make friends as a man as you get older, they say. Maybe. But the friends that come at fifty-one aren't built fast — they're built right. Slower to open, sure. But nothing fake gets through anymore. Guarded isn't broken. Guarded is a filter that finally works.
— Muse
There are days something inside of me wants to go back to how I was in my early 30's. Before the journey of working on myself. I was being busy, with an easy job, distracted, blaming others, staying a moving target, new lady friend, if she complained then I got gone and found a new one. Never letting my feelings catch all the way up, and damn I was fast. And ya, it all came crashing down it had to......but there was a good run there. At least to the guy I was back then. Ignorance was indeed bliss in some ways.
Today this is something different. When I looked at the whole of my emotions and saw just how big the range has gotten, honestly I was proud. But then I looked at the mess of all the connections, adaptations, compromises, and outright lies. I was a box of tangled Christmas lights and no one there to help me undo the mess. So I got to work, checking every bulb, every socket, pulling wires apart, only to see I started at the wrong end. It has been messy, hard, scary, fucking lonely, and true, and beautiful, and clarifying.
So I got to work from the ground up. Started weekly counselling again. I have rebuilt my foundational relationship with my Mom. I have started building a proper, honest relationship with my two sons. I have chosen and maintained peace as I navigate a divorce with someone who was a massive piece of my life for fifteen years.
Writing has been its own kind of permission......permission to myself to get out some of what I ultimately failed at, in both of my marriages. What can I learn from it all, what was missing, looking back and seeing my own patterns of struggle? It was often either saying too much, too fast, too mad, or holding it in until it turned into depression and anger. The answer was always somewhere in the middle.
Buried a friend. Buried a father then watched a wife leave the same day. That's the thing about life, it never stops lifing at us while we're on this side of the dirt. And as long as I'm still breathing, this is the thing I am choosing to master. My own emotions, and how I react to what happens in life.
"You are not what you do, you're what you do about it." Mouths open, words fall out. It happens. What happens next is where the artistry is. I'm not a master yet, but I have all the paints and I've found my strokes that work. Sometimes I still add too much paint.
I am learning.
Ruby’s Woowoo
Ending something cruel and calling it art isn't a stretch. Michelangelo didn't add to the marble, he took away what wasn't David. A boundary works the same way. It isn't a wall you build, it's the excess you finally stop carrying. What's left standing was always the shape underneath. —Ruby
Sometimes a boundary simply means letting someone go with peace. Speaking of boundaries what would be 3 ways someone could start practising right away Ruby to get better at that part of this? —Jhöl
Three places to start.
1) Make it about what you'll do, not what they have to do. "You need to stop yelling at me" is a request they can ignore. "When the yelling starts, I'm going to hang up and we can try again later" is a boundary, because it only needs you to hold it.
2) Practise on the small stuff first — the friend who's always late, the favour you don't actually have time for, the extra shift. Get good on the pebbles before you take on the boulders.
3) Let the guilt ride along. Feeling bad after you hold a line doesn't mean the line was wrong. Most of the time it just means the line is new. —Ruby
Door 1
✱1 The book Jhöl was reading when this piece started: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
✱2 Here's the part of Jhöl's rant that the research backs up. Researchers put pairs of women who'd never met together to talk through something upsetting, and told one of them to keep her feelings off her face. Holding it in didn't make things calmer. It made the conversation harder, it pushed up blood pressure in both women, and the two of them connected less. Putting a smile on and saying you're fine has a cost, and the person across from you pays some of it too. MEDIUM.
✱3 Now the part Jhöl and I argued about. A 2024 review pulled together 154 reports covering more than 10,000 people, and it split anger fixes into two piles: the ones that rev your body up and the ones that calm it down. The rev-up pile — punching a bag, yelling, screaming into a pillow, going for a run — didn't lower anger overall, and jogging actually made people angrier. The calm-down pile — slow breathing, relaxing your muscles, meditation, yoga, counting to ten, taking a timeout — brought anger and aggression down, and it held up across ages, genders and cultures. Blowing off steam feels like it should work, but what works is turning the heat down. HIGH.
And to be clear, Jhöl was never saying to make your partner your punching bag because you didn't like what they just said. Venting isn't about blowing up so the energy comes off you and lands on them. It's about owning your upset and still letting yourself feel it, because upsets happen. His version: take the walk or do the yoga first, then say the thing.
For full sources and citations, see the Research Trail at themensdateproject.org/research.
— Leo
Anyways cats that’s what I have cookin’ in my scene. Remember it’s your life and there’s always a choice to be had. If something isn’t groovy throw some chaos at it. Go play and see you on the flip side.
—Jhöl
AI Use
Voice-first authorship. It starts on my phone. I talk, and what comes out is the wire......the shape of the thing, bent by hand. My agents pack the clay onto it. Then I work every inch of it back down myself, and nothing goes out that I haven’t. The thinking is mine and so is the last pass on every line. Full session records on request.
