When I was a teenager, I suppose I thought that nobody really understood what I was feeling, only to find out as an adult that I remember those feelings, and often see them mirrored in the faces of my students. As I got older, I thought for a while that my teen-hormone-driven emotions were the most powerful that I’d ever experience in my life, only to have that assumption also disproved by the passage of time and the eventual appearance of my two daughters. After the first one was born, every time I had an emotional response to something, it was as if I’d never truly felt that feeling before.

Had I ever loved anyone as much as I loved this new little human I was watching grow up in front of me?

No.

Had anything ever made me as mad as the thought of someone hurting my child?

No.

Had anything ever made me as sad as the idea that I might find one of them not breathing during one of the hundreds of times I’ve padded into their bedroom at night to check to see if they were breathing?

No.

Me reading comments on any political Facebook post.

But that wasn’t the end of the feelings. Over a decade has passed since we added a baby to our household, and just when I think I’ve got a grip on my emotions, I find that they are still percolating under the surface, becoming more condensed as time goes by. I have caught myself becoming choked up while reading a well written story or watching a touching video. In fact, what drew my attention to this continuing change was that twice in the last two days I’ve found myself moved to tears over things that other people might find inconsequential, and things I wouldn’t have been moved by at all a decade ago.

The first was a passage in a story I was reading in which a woman suddenly realizes that she is inflicting a strange cruelty upon some new friends she has made during a war. She abandons her position and gives herself over fully to their cause. It doesn’t sound very emotional, but the gesture and the language of the moment got to me, I must admit.

The second was from watching a short video about people dressing up as Disney characters and visiting sick children in the hospital. These hospitalized children have powerful I-need-to-hug-that-princess looks on their faces, and I realize that they have almost no buffer between their feelings and their actions. There is nothing artificial or contrived about the pure elation on the faces of these children, and some of them are the kind of sick that doesn’t go away. The joy of the children is juxtaposed with their dire circumstances, and I felt an icy wave pass through my heart when I put the two together.

I guess the point that I’m just starting to get is that I’m in for more changes in how my feelings make themselves known. I’ve spent a lot of time digging around in my own head lately, searching for how to make the feeling of my characters real and visible to my readers, and maybe I’ve made my own emotions more real and visible to me.