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Feeling Before Thinking: What Susan Sontag Taught Us About Experience as the True Language of Understanding.

The project of my life has been overcoming all that holds me back, and all that holds me back is my mind.

So, the project of my life is overcoming my mind.

Why is the mind so often the place where we get trapped? Why are we consumed by thoughts concerned with who we are or aren't instead of simply living the who-ness of ourselves?

One reason, I assume, is to avoid feeling the discomfort of what our thoughts want us to believe. Instead of feeling the discomfort in our bodies and assessing it for what it is—emotions—we escape to a crueler place: our mind, where we interpret our every interaction to convince ourselves that what we fear is valid.

We spend so much time dissecting our social, romantic, and workplace interactions—analyzing personal dynamics, professional failures, and disappointments—yet so little time directly engaging with the sensory and emotional experience of life itself. The result? We wind up repeating much of what we'd hoped to avoid. After all, it is far easier to intellectualize emotion than to feel it—but where does this lead?

In the seminal essay from her 1966 book Against Interpretation, writer, intellectual and cultural critic, Susan Sontag protests against the habit of critiquing and analyzing art in favor of developing a more emotional connection with art and literature.

Her critique of modern criticism is that it seeks to decode or explain art's "hidden" meanings. She believes this reduces the complexity of art to intellectual puzzles, thereby stifling its emotional and sensory impact. She urges readers to engage with art through feeling rather than analysis.

So much emphasis is placed on meaning, and the critic’s tendency to search for a singular, didactic interpretation of art often limits its impact. In my view, this emphasis perpetuates a misguided belief that there are ‘right’ and 'wrong' ways to experience and interpret a work of art—a belief that can be damaging and psychically debilitating for many artists.

At one time, art and culture were primarily experienced as emotional and sensory phenomena. Sontag would have probably palled around with Aristotle, for instance, since he saw art as therapeutically beneficial—he believed it could evoke and purge dangerous emotions. He gave us the concept of catharsis, believing that art revealed truths about the human condition and engaged audiences emotionally and intellectually.

Plato, however, saw art as a deception—a "mimesis" (an imitation of reality), not truth itself. He feared that art could mislead people by presenting a distorted view of the world and prioritized intellectual pursuits over sensory experiences.

Over time, the lens shifted, moving from sensory to intellectual experience. Art gradually became a vehicle for ideas, and artists began to be seen as thinkers, using their craft to express complex ideas and social critiques.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, formal art criticism emerged, transforming art from an experience to be felt into an object to be deciphered—meaning was extracted through analysis, not lived through the senses.

By the 20th century, the intellectualization of art swiped right on psychoanalysis, introducing a new view through which to analyze art—unconscious desires.

Sontag argued for a return to a more direct and sensory experience of art, lamenting that modern critics strip away the immediacy of art by imposing intellectual frameworks that obscure its aesthetic power. She calls for an appreciation of art's sensory, emotional, and formal aspects—its form, structure, and editing—not just its intellectual or symbolic meaning.

For the first two decades of my life, my sensory experience was too acute. I felt things too hard, too loudly, too much, too intensely—and those sensations terrified me, sending me into anxious spirals and panic attacks. The emotions in my body were overwhelming, a constant reminder that not only the world but my very body was a terrifying place to inhabit.

Being in my head was a way to escape the terror inside my body. In my mind, I could at least create distance, as though being away from my body might save my life. I got trapped in the treehouse of my mind, trying to distance myself from the overwhelming sensations of panic and fear that my body held and that I was afraid to feel.

The overwhelming sensations that never scare me are those I feel in nature, listening to music, experiencing art, or reading. All forms and mediums of art move me. It's not my natural inclination to ask what a work of art "means," nor to dissect or analyze literature in search of some greater message. My body takes things in, and it's from there that I know the world.

When I write, it is with my body. My books are just feelings styled into sentences.

But this intuitive way of existing and creating art isn't valued in our culture, and my entire adult life has been a struggle to realize that I am expected to actually MAKE SENSE OF THINGS.

ME! A person who feels first and thinks second. A person who no one could make sense of for 25 years.

When my first novel, The Long Haul, came out, an interviewer asked me what the book was about. I felt stunned—how could I possibly say what all those feelings were "about"?

I've never thought it was an artist's job to interpret their work for an audience, but the world often doesn't agree with me, so—naturally—I've come to assume I'm wrong, despite holding onto a deep-seated belief that maybe I’m not?

So much of what has held me back in life is what Sontag is repudiating—over-intellectualizing. Although, in my case—as in many—what I'm over-analyzing is myself: my life, trying to decipher codes and meaning from the content of my actions, behavior, moods, and so on, instead of experiencing life and myself in the way I do naturally—through sensation.

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