You’re reading How to Live, a weekly examination of the unconscious logic behind our attachments, defenses, distortions, and recurring dilemmas. Most of what shapes us operates outside awareness. This newsletter attempts to make those structures legible.
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Most writers think they’re writing emotion, but they’re actually writing feeling.
That difference flattens work, leaving it predictable or cliched. The language that moves readers doesn’t come from naming or thinking; it comes from tracking the pre-verbal currents that generate emotion, before they are named.
In my five-hour master class, I teach Kinesthetic Realism, the method I developed to excavate these hidden pulses, tensions, and vibrations, and translate them into language that lets readers experience the emotion as vividly as the writer does.
March 18th + 19th 7-9:30pm EST on Zoom | $179
12 spots only. Full description on sale page.
Every purchase includes a free 30 minute writing consultation with me.
What Amanda does is something akin to hypnosis or a medicine journey. Our sessions generated new pages, but the more valuable discovery was a new facet of the project I’m not sure I would have found without her guidance.
Taking this class for a second time was just as rich and rewarding as the first. I appreciate the way Amanda encourages everyone to dive in and try and the way she meets every question with care. This is a class you can return to again and again, knowing that each time you will uncover something new within yourself both as a person and as a writer.
There’s a Name for the Texture of Being You
There is a specific quality to the light in March when we spring forward, around 7pm, when it comes through west-facing windows and turns everything a particular cushiony pink. You probably have a feeling you associate with it; a specific interior texture that arrives with that light and doesn’t arrive in the same way any other time.
For me, it falls somewhere between the sand dunes of melancholy and the hopeful lift underneath a bird in fresh flight.
Throughout the year, nature’s flares call up various internal sensations. The first fall breeze as it lifts the hair from your arms, the smell of wood burning in winter, the vaguely metallic scent of first snow; all separate tones plucked from the same string.
We nod to these swells inside us, recognizing the expression of the outside world inside our bodies, the link between seasons and their companion feeling-tones. But what is this quality of the feeling itself called? How to name the what-it’s-like-ness inside our particular nervous system?
The term didn’t enter philosophy in its modern sense until 1929, in a book called Mind and the World-Order by a Harvard logician named C.I. Lewis. Lewis was working on what sounds like an abstract problem: how does knowledge get built from raw experience?
His answer required a distinction between two layers.
The first layer, he called the conceptual. These are the interpretive frameworks we bring to experience, the categories and names. The second, underneath all of that, was the raw, pre-interpretive feel of sensation itself. The thing that arrives before you’ve thought anything about it.
He needed a name for this second layer. He called it qualia.
“Qualia” is the plural form of the Latin word quale, meaning “what sort” or “what kind” (derived from qualis).
He noted that qualia, by their nature, have no names in ordinary language; they can only be pointed at obliquely, with phrases like “looks like” or “appears to be.”
He was essentially naming the unnamed, and identifying a stratum of experience that language perpetually fails to capture, while using language to do it.
Lewis was a careful, private man, the son of a shoemaker in Massachusetts who discovered philosophy at thirteen, reading about the pre-Socratics. By the time he coined “qualia,” he was the Edgar Pierce Professor in Philosophy at Harvard and had already invented the foundations of modern modal logic.
Qualia are directly accessible only to the person experiencing them. I cannot know if your experience of a 7pm pink sky at the turn of spring is the same as my own, making them intensely personal and impossible to fully share. Conscious experience has a first-person character that is irreducible to any third-person description, however complete.
Science describes the world from the outside.
Qualia describes the inside. It’s what the quality of feeling itself is like. It is the redness of red. The blue of blue. The cushiony pink of a 7pm sky in early March. What is left over when you subtract all the physical facts of sensation is the experience of what it is to be you.
Until next week, I will remain…
Amanda
Paid subscribers read essays examining the psychological forces that determine behavior; why we repeat patterns we claim to reject, how we mistake performance for authenticity, why we pursue desires we've inherited rather than chosen.
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Quick note: Nope, I’m not a therapist—just someone who spent 25 years with undiagnosed panic disorder and 23 years in therapy. How to Live distills what I’ve learned through lived experience, therapy, and obsessive research—so you can skip the unnecessary suffering and better understand yourself.
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