Understanding yourself is the quiet kind of intelligence
I used to think being smart meant knowing everything — quick answers, strong logic, sounding confident even when I wasn’t. I chased that version of intelligence for years. But somewhere along the way I noticed that being “smart” didn’t always mean being okay. The clever ones, the overthinkers, the perfectionists — some of them struggled the hardest inside.
That’s when I began to learn something school never taught me: emotional awareness. It’s not about reading more books or solving harder problems. It’s about noticing what’s happening inside you before it turns into noise.
For a long time I ignored my feelings. If I felt sad, I distracted myself. If I got angry, I stayed quiet. I told myself emotions made me weak. They didn’t go away. They piled up until they burst at odd times.
One night I opened a notebook and simply wrote what I felt. Not poetry, not plans — just blunt sentences: “I’m scared.” “I’m tired.” “I miss how things were.” It was messy and small, but after that I felt lighter. Naming the feeling didn’t fix everything, but it stopped the pressure from building inside so fast.
That’s the power of emotional awareness. It doesn’t mean you’re always calm or that problems vanish. It means you stop fighting yourself. You notice why you react, why you shut down, why you push people away. You get a moment — a tiny space — between the feeling and the action. That pause changes things.
IQ can help you solve problems in the outside world. Emotional awareness helps you solve the ones inside you. It makes you kinder with others and with yourself. It teaches you to pause, to name, to choose a better response instead of an automatic one.
So tell me — when was the last time you stopped and asked, “How am I really feeling?” You might be surprised by the answer.
