Amid capitalism and patriarchal socializing, some of you may have a difficult relationship with emotions. You may come to view them as a kind of inconvenience or flaw in the way of being a well-oiled machine. That when others talk of processing emotions, it means you need to process them like one might oil a squeaky gear on a machine, so that you can go back to running smoothly.

But this understanding of emotion has it backward. Experiencing and processing your emotions is itself a part of what makes you human. When you do this, that is what is “running smoothly” in human terms. The nature of a human and a machine is not the same. We are judged by our humanity and a machine is judged by its efficiency. For us to compare, a broken gear is not equivalent to a broken arm, but instead is more equivalent to a broken morality. It is when you repress, distract, and otherwise deny yourself the time and energy to process and experience emotions that you are becoming more comparable to the squeaky gear of a machine. You are denying yourself a part of your humanity, just as the squeak is denying the machine a part of its efficiency.

Remember to understand yourself as a human, judged by standards of humanity. I know there are many metaphors out there that frame humans as similar to [whatever the latest technological advance is], but you are still human doing human things, whether you see yourself that way or not.