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Emotional Check-Ins for Yourself and Others

That aren’t just, ‘Hey, how’re you feeling?’

Sophie Lucido Johnson

Published in

Forge

4 min readMar 3, 2022

I was on the elevator at the art school where I work the other day with one other guy, when a new person stepped in. The guy knew the new person, and said, “Hey! How’re you doing?”

The other person stammered.

“I’m… like… you know. I’m doing.”

“Yeah,” the guy said. “I get it. Me too.”

I wanted to be like, “Hey guys! Me too! And everyone I know, too! And the whole world, too! How are we doing!? THERE AREN’T WORDS!” But I didn’t, because then I would be that person on the elevator. The one who makes you get off three floors before you need to just to get away from them faster.

But the stammering response is familiar, especially right now. Times are heavy. It’s hard to really put a word on how you’re feeling. (I’ve written about this before, and provided a bunch of emotional vocabulary words for those of you who are interested in that.)

And still, it’s important for us to talk about how we’re doing. We don’t have to soliloquize to everyone we run into in an elevator about our inner churnings, but in moments of despair, connection is crucial. We are social, emotional animals. Sharing about feelings is physically healing for us. (There’s science to…

This is a very interesting piece. It is hard to find the right words to describe how I’m feeling, so I usually just say ‘I’m fine’. My husband laughs as he says “fine” means ‘frustrated, insecure, neurotic & exasperated.’ He’s no counselor either. Lol

Interesting and helpful. Wish I'd done this when I was teaching middle-schoolers: their emotions are often so big and roiling, and it's not realistic to expect them to just move from math to PE to English without acknowledging them. Personally, I find the weather analogy most apt. Some days, the clouds roll in.