What am I feeling?

There’s this old trick I remember hearing about that if you really want a girl to fall in love with you, you should do exciting things like take her on roller coasters or take her hiking to really get her heart pumping. The logic as I remember it isn’t that she’ll fall in love with such an adventurous guy, it’s that you’ll get her heart racing and she’ll misinterpret it as feelings for you.

How crazy is that? Let’s run that back:

1) Take a girl on a roller coaster
2) Her heart starts racing (because of the roller coaster)
3) She interprets that as excitement for being around you
4) She falls in love with you

The jump from 2) to 3) makes me think about my feelings. It means that our bodies send us signals, then our mind makes the jump to interpret those as feelings. It means it’s possible for me to make mistakes in interpreting the sensations in my body as feelings. I never think like that.

Ask me what I’m feeling and I’ll tell you an emotion — happy, frustrated, in awe etc. I won’t tell you that I’m not sure. I won’t tell you that my heart is beating a little bit faster than usual, my chest feels a little bit tight, I have some sweat on my forehead and my best interpretation of that is stressed out but I could be wrong and it could be jealousy or heck, it could be disappointment.

It makes me think that the better I get at translating how I feel physically into feelings and then into causes of those feelings, the better off I’ll be. I guess that’s what they mean when they say being in touch with your feelings.