“ Your feelings are wrong”

He said it standing in my own den. I believed him for longer than I want to admit.

I can still see the room.

I was standing in the den of our house in Roanoke, near the patio doors. I think I had a cigarette in my hand. I was married to my first husband, the preacher at this time. I was trying to explain why I did not want to do something.

I do not remember the exact argument anymore.

I remember the sentence.

He looked at me and said, “Your feelings are wrong.”

I can still remember the way I stared at him.

Wrong?

My feelings were wrong?

Not my reasoning. Not my conclusion. Not my behavior.

My feelings.

He proceeded to explain why I was not feeling the proper way about whatever situation he wanted me to participate in.

And something in me changed.

There was no screaming. No suitcase by the door. No dramatic exit.

I simply knew.

I have to get out of here.

I did not leave that day. I do not even remember how long it took me to act on that knowing. Six months? A year? Memory is funny that way.

But I remember the moment the decision was made inside me.

Because feelings are not right or wrong.

They are information.

They are the body saying, this hurts.

This frightens me.

I do not want this.

I feel trapped.

I feel angry.

I feel diminished.

You can disagree with what another person concludes from those feelings. You can disagree with what they choose to do next.

But you do not get to tell another human being that what they feel is incorrect.

And I think that is why I have such a visceral reaction now when someone tries to correct my lived experience simply because it does not match theirs.

I have no problem with disagreement.

A woman can say to me, “But what about those of us with health problems?” after reading one of my posts about using retirement to expand instead of shrink.

Fine.

That is a conversation.

She is bringing another reality into the room.

What I cannot tolerate is the person who says, in essence, “No. You are wrong about your own experience. Let me explain reality to you.”

I lived too many years inside that kind of arrangement.

As the preacher’s wife I was expected to support the job, support the image, support the church, support the man.

I was very good window dressing.

What I was not always permitted to be was a fully separate human being with thoughts, desires, resistance, anger, preferences, and feelings of my own.

That day in the den, I understood something I would spend years learning how to live.

No one gets final editorial approval over my inner life. Not a husband. Not a church. Not a family member telling me I’m too sensitive, or a stranger on the internet telling me I’m too much.

I am the authority on what it feels like to be me.

And I suspect a great many women do not leave the moment they first know something is wrong.

You may have had your own version of that room. Your own version of the sentence. Maybe no one said the words out loud — maybe it was just a look, a silence, a “you’re overreacting” that landed the same way.

Sometimes the leaving begins quietly.

Sometimes it begins standing beside a patio door with a cigarette in your hand while somebody tells you that your feelings are wrong.

Sometimes the revolution happens long before anybody else can see it.

If you know, I know you know.

Monica