Emotions:

We encourage you to take some time to figure out what emotional wellness means to you.

One of the realizations that our team came to was that our conceptions of emotions were contextual, spatial, and temporal. Essentially, the places, spaces, and ages we navigated dictated how we viewed and regulated our wellness. We reflected on our earliest awareness of emotions. 

Kamia:
I remember being in elementary school, and there would be behavior charts for all the students. When we misbehaved, we received a frowny face. When we did well, we received a smiley face. I associated misbehavior with sadness, and inversely, good (nondeviant) behavior with happiness. Basically, actions were attached to feelings. I did not know how to separate them.

As practitioners in higher education, many of us still engage with our institutions as we did with elementary classrooms. We have learned and adopted practices and ideologies that yield positive responses. We look for affirmation (smiley faces) from colleagues, promotion structures, supervisors, and students, even though we know superficial reward systems are not designed to be in our best interest. 

LaTecia: When my grandfather passed away, I did not understand why people in my family were emotional or even the magnitude of what had happened. I knew I had never seen my mother cry, and even on the day of her father’s death, I still did not see her cry. I believed emotions were something people “did” behind closed doors. As I got older, I realized that was not the best way to express myself. Instead, emotions were a healthy process, and being able to talk about them with your loved ones was even healthier. 

So many of us internalize that we must put on a facade in the workplace. Many Black professionals, in particular, feel the need to suppress our emotions at work. We can’t be too disappointed, too upset, too joyful, too unbothered… too nothing. Often, we must navigate institutions that are too frail to handle our smile or frown lines. 

Jordan: The first emotion I can recall might be that feeling you get when you are comforted and secure. I remember being with my immediate family, grandma, and aunt on our porch for a family breakfast. We cooked pecan pancakes, bacon, grits, and some other things. We played music and just enjoyed each other's company. I remember sitting next to my grandma talking with her and making side jokes and comments about things going on. 

Others of us may be content within our institutions and feel like our institutions and the people within them love us back. We may have found our niche communities, activities, programs, and service projects. In these instances, we cling to the people and spaces that feel most like home to us and enjoy making memories among them. 

Devore: I was 3 years old, it was my birthday, and I can remember being happy. Although it was a new experience, it was an overflowing feeling of acceptance and joy. Couple that, also, with being placed in time-out in the corner for misbehaving, which led me to feeling uneasy and isolated. Looking back at these early emotions, I can say that I did not have a grasp on the complexity nor scale of these emotions but they were more so seen as stages in my day.

Sometimes, our institutions send us mixed messages. One minute, we’re pleased and positively surprised by how they respond to an issue. The next minute, we’re ashamed and alarmed by the lack of care they showed when addressing another issue. Despite the context, our institutions are responsible for taking us a rollercoaster of a ride each day we show up for them. We must learn to recognize when our emotions change from hour-to-hour so that we can self-regulate as we see fit. 

Like us, we want you to reflect on the emotional habits you’ve adopted and broken to form conceptions about wellness.

Think about the signals, affirmations, warnings, and acts of resistance that happen within yourself that trigger how you act and react to life.

At iRise Wellness, we think the internal feedback loops that maintain emotional wellness are so important that we’ve based our entire Quarter One content and curriculum on it.

We describe emotional wellness as follows: 

Definition: Emotional wellness describes the extent to which one is able to process their feelings. It refers to a spectrum of internal and external responses that one relies on to understand, address, and communicate their emotions. It is contextual and dependent on reactions to various people, tasks, and situations throughout daily experiences. 

To us, wellness is our brand and guiding light for navigating higher education. Understanding emotional wellness, specifically, serves as a tool for better serving the people we care about most. Invest in yourself and your emotional wellness!