TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Emotions have always gotten a bad rap. They're like New Jersey to native New Yorkers: You know it exists, but don't want to go there. Sure, there's beauty in New Jersey, but you have to spend time there to find it.

Even positive emotions can earn you eye rolls. Those who can't contain their joy and pride are often accused of earnestness, or worse, sentimentality, as if gushing weakens us as people. But it's the bleaker emotions I'm here to talk about, the ones that scare us even more.

The often-overwhelming shadows that emotions cast inside our bodies, darkening what was light just seconds earlier, are so uncomfortable and frightening that we try to avoid feeling the sensations. We're so adept at dodging out of discomfort's way that we spend years hiding our emotions, not just from other people, but from ourselves.

Yet this withholding only exacerbates our sense of loneliness and alienation. Being honest about our interior world and the private struggle that comes with it can be terrifying, not only because of how others might react, but because of how our bodies do.

To be truthful means feeling that sickening backsplash of reality rise in our throats, reminding us that we're mired in unresolved uncertainty. Who wants that?

Here's what I've learned after a lifetime of studying my own fear and panic: Despite how much we think we understand our interior universe, many of us confuse emotions with feelings.

But they are not the same thing. And knowing the difference might change your life.

I know that sounds hyperbolic. But it’s true. Today’s piece gets to the heart of it.

Were we to be taken apart surgically, there isn’t a doctor in the world who would be able to locate this thing we call “I.”

We can’t capture it under a microscope or prod it during surgery.

The “I” of us, the “self” of me, isn’t concrete or tangible, yet we are all, to varying degrees of consciousness, trying to grow, tame, avoid, hurt, help, and even nurture it.

But what and who are we caring for?

Who is this “I” we always speak of?

Where does the “I” of me live?

When we refer to ourselves, we use the names our parents chose for us, which represent this supposed “I,” but our bodies are not who we are.

They are physical vehicles that allow us to contain and transport our organs from one place to another without spillage.

We constantly mistake the bodies of us for the “I” of us. We humans are known for this—misapprehending as real all that is phantom.

Take God, for instance.

Or, a better, less polarizing example, my favorite topic: Emotion.

When anxious, we mistake the sensations of dread and fear inside our bodies to mean that something is dangerous. We confuse our somatic waves of worry that someone hates us, or that we’re getting fired, or any number of things, with fact.

But feelings are not facts, no matter how real the feeling.

Many people find themselves trapped in silent competitions against their peers using arbitrary measures, plotting their achievements and failures onto an invisible chart they believe is who they are.

But we are not our measurements, and if we are not our test results or the measure of our outsized emotions, and if we are not our bodies or even our brains, what, then, are we?

In 1991, David Kelley — founder of IDEO, a pioneering and innovative design consultancy, and the legendary d. school at Stanford — was asked to redesign a shopping cart. Instead of sketching better wheels or a sturdier basket, he assembled a team and sent them to grocery stores with one instruction: watch people shop.

They discovered that shopping carts weren't really a product problem.

The problem was people.

People abandoned carts in parking lots because returning them was annoying (guilty, sorry!) They chose broken carts because they couldn't tell which ones worked. They crashed into displays because the carts handled like drunk elephants.

IDEO redesigned the cart entirely, making it modular, maneuverable, and impossible to steal. But the cart wasn’t the real innovation, it was the method:

This is called design thinking, and it works on lives as well as shopping carts.

When we address our stuckness, and seek to redesign our lives, we often treat the endeavor to change like filling out a form.

We identify the problem: I hate my job, my relationship feels stale, I'm anxious all the time…then jump straight to solutions: quit, break up, up my dosage of Lexapro.

We skip the most important step: understanding what's actually happening.

For those with chronic anxiety, uncertainty doesn't just feel uncomfortable, it feels unbearable. Even the most ordinary moments can seem precarious. When we try to articulate this, people without anxiety often hear negativity. What they're actually hearing is what worry sounds like in its mother tongue.

I've spent my entire life studying my own fear. First as a child, without words, awash in the immediate textures and sensations of terror, and then later, through every phase of adulthood.

What follows are just a handful of resources that have genuinely helped me. I've included some books for parents of anxious children, but I HIGHLY recommend non-parents, who might have been anxious as children, give them a read.

I have zero point zero children and I cannot stress how helpful they’ve been.

For decades I kept my psychological struggles private. Then I started talking about them with people I trusted, and then with everyone, and it changed everything. Dramatically.

When we hide our internal lives, the fear of exposure grows larger than the thing we're hiding. Our feelings shouldn't function as secrets, because treating them as secrets tells us there's something shameful to conceal. There isn't.

Everyone suffers. Everyone worries. Not enough people say so out loud.

If there were ever a time to chant in unison “I’m goddamn terrified,” it’s now.

When I was writing my memoir Little Panic, I'd tell people vaguely that I was "writing about anxiety." Every single person—and I mean every single person—leaned in immediately to confess they were riddled with anxiety too. "If you need to interview someone," they'd say, "I'm the poster child."

This happened so consistently it taught me something crucial: I wasn't as alone as I believed, and neither are you.

Here’s what’s helped…

Until next week, I will remain…