Do you know when you’re angry?

This isn’t a fallacious question. My mother always denied feeling angry when she obviously was, storming around the kitchen, slamming drawers and cupboards.

Do you allow yourself to feel jealousy? Or envy? Or any of those socially not acceptable emotions?

I have a character who’s angry pretty much all the time. But she doesn’t allow herself to feel it, not really, not until the third novel. She’s going to have to express if physically, have another character comment on it, without ever really being aware of it herself. It’s a tricky dance, and quite possibly too subtle. I keep thinking about it.

I have a second character who must, by the end of the third novel, deny his feelings, bottle them up and never express them, ever again. Again, tricky to show.

Personally, I’m very unaware of when I’m tired. I had an undiagnosed thyroid condition for most of my life. I was tired all the time, but I never let myself experience it. I’d drive myself to exhaustion on a regular basis, come down with what I called an exhaustion cold. I thought I had a weak immune system, and was always getting sick. It wasn’t that at all.

One of the things I was supposed to work on this year was allowing myself to feel tired. I really haven’t done that work at all, though. But maybe I will this weekend, as I recover from my ordeal of this past week.