When You Say "I'm Good" – Are You?

Emotional intelligence is about the particular exhaustion of making your insides presentable for the outside. That moment when someone asks, "How are you?" and you have to decide, in half a second, what version of the truth your face and voice are going to tell.

HRs privatized this term. I write it, and I feel a slick corporate sheen blinding me from the monitor. It seems like I should add it somewhere on my résumé. With a checkmark, or better, a score (because AI resume scanners love numbers too much). For them, your feelings are a resource to be managed, allocated, and deployed strategically in the service of productivity.

Look, the ability to read a room, to not blow up at your coworker – those are useful masteries. But they aren't mechanical or hydraulic. I read a post on LinkedIn recently. Emotions are water pressure, apparently. You just need better pipes. The metaphor is so tidy. However, tidiness is a lie when it comes to what happens inside.

I want you to see the phrase "emotional intelligence" and remember the times when things get rough. That thing people do in a car or in a shower after a difficult conversation – when you finally let your face collapse. Maybe cry. How we're all becoming champions of swallowing anger. We have a gold medal hanging around our necks, but we don't notice it until it shows up as a headache or as insomnia.

What I've learned (and am still learning) is that the real skill here is capacity. Building enough space inside yourself to let a feeling be there without it destroying you, without having to immediately make it smaller or more acceptable. The willingness to actually be where you are, emotionally speaking, instead of where you think you should be.

The people I know who are most fluent in the language of emotions are often the most miserable. They've gotten so good at managing how they come across that they've lost track of how they actually feel. I think of their intelligence as pitch-black sunglasses – nobody sees the real look in their eyes, whether they're tearful or bagged with a month of sleeplessness. But sunglasses so dark you forget what your own eyes look like. The better you get at emotional intelligence, the easier it becomes to use that intelligence to avoid actually feeling anything.

I'm very afraid to get so good at managing feelings that I never have to really have them. My goal is to get so comfortable with having them that I need to manage less.