Translating Emotion to the Page | A Bit of Optimism #podcast

8 Aug 2024 · 0 min

Watch on YouTube

0:29

A short excerpt from a YouTube podcast episode (Translating Emotion to the Page | A Bit of Optimism) in which Simon Sinek and another speaker discuss how converting lived experience into written form—specifically a poem—changes one’s relationship to the emotion. The speaker reports welling up when reading their poem and explains the poem helped separate the story from the self; Sinek observes that written form encapsulates and externalizes experience, allowing different ways of sharing and internalizing. The speaker notes the poem was created primarily for their own benefit, though they shared it aloud.

I have told that story before on stages. I don't well up like I used to.
Yeah.
And I welled up here. This was simply emotion on a page.
There's something that happens when you create something with the story that's different than when you tell the story. When you're telling a story out loud, it's hard to separate it from the rest of your life. But when you turn the language into.
A poem, it.
Almost, like, encapsulates it, and then you separate it from you. It's outside of you. And that space allows you to share it differently, and it allows you to internalize it differently.
We tell stories largely for the benefit of others. And this exercise, the poem was meant for the benefit of me. I just happened to share it with you.
That's right.