David O'Mahony: Perhaps ‘going in the book’ is the best way to deal with our emotions

Any time I annoy her — usually with such heinous crimes as saying 'you need to tidy all your stuff away' — there’s a high chance we’ll find Daughter scribbling in a notebook, sketching sad faces or rain clouds, usually annotated for clarity

When she was smaller she had a particular copybook that she liked to use, showing it off proudly to her grandfather once by explaining 'these are my feelings'. Stock picture: iStock

There’s a phenomenon in our house known as “going in the book”.

It’s not a Garda notebook. It’s actually something much worse.

Daughter likes to draw her feelings. This is, I hasten to add, quite admirable, and I have no idea where she got the idea, though I know art therapy is a thing and have met more than one person online who do something similar when they’re struggling with something (the only thing Daughter is struggling with for the most part is not getting her own way).

When she was smaller she had a particular copybook that she liked to use, showing it off proudly to her grandfather once by explaining “these are my feelings”. 

So any time I annoy her — usually with such heinous crimes as “you need to tidy all your stuff away” or “stop messing, you’ll hurt yourself” — there’s a high chance we’ll find her scribbling in a notebook, sketching sad faces or rain clouds, usually annotated for clarity. That’s our clarity, I hasten to add, just so we know exactly how devilish we’ve been.

Hence, going in the book.

But once done and the point is made, it’s usually forgotten about and life moves on, as it tends to do both when we want it to and when we’d rather it stood still just long enough for us to catch our breath.

A Valentine's card for the cat

And it’s not as if she’s shy about articulating her feelings. If you have ever had a small child in your life, you know yourself that they don’t tend to be. 

Daughter, already well able to stand her own ground and a staunch supporter of kindness being very important in all things (she wrote the cat a card saying “Happy Meowanstine’s Day” last week), is perfectly capable of being a little rage monster, as is only right and proper for one who is small and wishes to accomplish great things in the face of a world that sometimes seems too much.

Still, better to feel a little too much than not enough, though the trick is in how to make best use of it.

At their most fundamental levels, there are two types of anger: One that breaks, and one that fixes. The breaking one can be turned inward or outward, but generally just brings sorrow one way or the other (looking at you, America). The fixing one, however, gets stuff done. 

Fury against injustice 

Archimedes may have said “give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world” but he never understood the sheer motivational power of fury against injustice.

It’s easy to confuse the two, because autocrats channeling rage to smash things always claim they’re doing it for the greater good (spoiler alert, they’re not). And there’s something of a parallel in leadership studies, where there are two types of power: Power to have, and power to give (I actually have a certificate in this, I’m not pulling it out of thin air). 

Like the two types of anger, the former just wants to have control, while the latter wants promotion so they can uplift other people around them.

Now, that’s not to say that some old systems shouldn’t be broken and replaced or rebuilt into something better (disability services, housing, take your pick). But a fixing anger, the sort that underlies punk in many ways, aims to ultimately improve things.

'Green Day played three songs fuelled by anger at the damage done by American conservative politics during their short pre-Super Bowl set.' Picture: Kindell Buchanan/PA

That could be in terms of political representation, but just as easily it can be channeled through art. 

There’s a reason why Green Day played three songs fuelled by anger at the damage done by American conservative politics during their short pre-Super Bowl set — they were written in response to the Bush administration, but are probably even more relevant now (“information age of hysteria / It’s calling out to idiot America”).

Daughter, by the way, doesn’t know what I mean when I tell her she’s punk and thinks I’m vaguely insulting her, even if what I want to do is hug her and tell her how proud I am of her (I do this anyway, my kids don’t have to earn my love).

She has plenty of healthy ways to channel her feelings, whether it be taekwondo (took to it like a duck to water), gymnastics, or ballet. 

She wants to do art classes and would probably be gifted in theatre or speech and drama. All very positive ways to take whatever might be going on internally (likely because one of us told her to do something) and turn them into a positive, creative experience.

Too many of us, frankly, lose touch with our feelings until they manifest in destructive or otherwise unhelpful ways. 

Some of us spend a chunk of adulthood trying to undo the past. Emotions are fragile things, brittle like thin ice and as deep as the ocean. 

But half the time we don’t even know the right names for them, or even how to describe them. 

Maybe we should all follow Daughter’s lead, and put them in a book.