May 18, 2026
A reflective essay on what we feel, why we hide it, and what it costs us
There is a conversation most of us never had growing up. Not about careers, or relationships, or what we wanted to be when we grew up. Those conversations happened — in various forms, with varying degrees of pressure. The conversation I mean is quieter than that, and far more consequential. It is the conversation about what to do when something hurts. About what feelings are for. About whether it is safe — or even acceptable — to have them at all.
For many of us, especially those who grew up in South Asian homes, that conversation simply did not happen. And the silence it left behind has shaped us in ways we are only beginning to understand.
This essay is an attempt to have that conversation now. It is drawn from the first two episodes of my podcast, Soul Immersion Conversations — Soch Vichaar — and explored the inner life that so many of us were taught to keep hidden. But more than a reflection on the podcast, it is something I hope stands on its own: an honest look at why emotions matter, why we hide them, and what the cost of that hiding really is.
Emotions Are Not a Weakness. They Are a Language.
We live in a world that has a complicated relationship with feelings. On one hand, we are surrounded by messaging about mental health awareness, emotional intelligence, and the importance of vulnerability. On the other hand, the moment we actually express something difficult — grief, anger, fear, deep sadness — the discomfort in the room is palpable. We are told to feel our feelings, just not too loudly, and preferably not at work, or around family, or in public, or anywhere that might inconvenience someone else.
The result is a kind of emotional homelessness. We know we have feelings. We just don’t quite know where they’re allowed to live.
But here is what I have come to believe, and what the research on emotional psychology consistently supports: emotions are not interruptions to our rational lives. They are not signs of weakness, instability, or immaturity. They are information. They are the body and mind’s way of communicating something important — about our needs, our values, our relationships, our sense of safety or threat in the world.
Anger, for instance, is rarely just anger. Beneath it is almost always a boundary that has been crossed, a value that has been violated, or a need that has gone unmet. Anxiety is not simply nervousness — it is the nervous system alerting us to something it perceives as uncertain or dangerous, often before our conscious mind has caught up.
When we dismiss these signals — when we tell ourselves to push through, to toughen up, to not be so sensitive — we are not eliminating the emotion. We are simply refusing to read the message. And the message, unanswered, does not go away. It finds another way out.
The South Asian Silence
Growing up South Asian — in a home shaped by a particular cultural inheritance, a particular set of values around strength, duty, and honour — there was an implicit curriculum about emotions that ran alongside everything else. It was never written down and explained. But it was transmitted clearly, through what was said and what was not, through what was celebrated and what was quietly disapproved of.
The curriculum went something like this: feelings are private. Difficulty is endured, not discussed. Strength means not showing it. Log kya kahenge — what will people think — is a more powerful force than what you actually feel. And above all: the family’s face, its reputation, its image of togetherness, must be protected. Even if that means carrying something heavy entirely alone.
I do not say this to condemn that upbringing, or the parents and grandparents who passed it on. They were not wrong to value resilience. They were not wrong to understand that life requires endurance. Many of them survived things — migration, loss, displacement, financial hardship — that required precisely that kind of stoicism to get through. They gave us what had worked for them, or at least what had gotten them through.
But survival tools are not always the same as thriving tools. And what got one generation through a crisis can quietly become the thing that holds the next generation back.
The cost of that inheritance — the cost of learning to manage emotions outward while carrying them alone inward — is something I think many of us are only now beginning to tally.
What Hiding Costs Us
Here is something that is easy to overlook: suppressing an emotion is not the same as not feeling it. When we push something down — when we tell ourselves to move on, to not be dramatic, to keep it together — the emotion does not disappear. It goes somewhere. Into the body, into our patterns of behaviour, into the way we show up in relationships, into the quality of our sleep, into the low hum of anxiety that we have learned to treat as simply the background noise of being alive.
The psychological research on emotional suppression is remarkably consistent on this point. Chronic suppression — the habitual, long-term practice of not allowing difficult emotions to be felt or expressed — is associated with higher rates of anxiety and depression. It is linked to difficulties in relationships, because intimacy requires a degree of emotional honesty that suppression makes unsafe. It shows up in the body as chronic stress, tension, and in some research, heightened susceptibility to physical illness.
And perhaps most insidiously, suppression quietly erodes our relationship with ourselves. When we spend years not trusting our own emotional responses — labelling them as dramatic, or weak, or inappropriate — we gradually lose access to one of our most important sources of inner knowledge. We become strangers to ourselves.
There is also something worth naming specifically in the South Asian context, which is the way emotional suppression gets confused with virtue. In our communities, the person who does not show their pain is often quietly admired. They are seen as strong. As composed. As having their priorities right. The person who cries, who speaks openly about their struggles, who asks for help — they risk being seen as self-indulgent, or unstable, or someone who has forgotten that others have it harder.
But strength and suppression are not the same thing. One is a capacity and the other is a coping mechanism that has been learned.
I started this podcast because I believe that the conversation about our inner lives — about what we feel, why we feel it, and how we can learn to be with it more honestly — is one of the most important conversations we can have. Not instead of the conversations about career and family and contribution. Alongside them. Underneath them, even, because so much of how we show up in every area of life is shaped by the relationship we have with our own emotional world.
This is not about becoming someone who talks about their feelings all the time, or who makes every interaction an emotional processing session. It is about something quieter and more fundamental than that. It is about learning to be a fair witness to yourself. To notice what you feel without immediately judging it. To take your own inner experience seriously, even when — especially when — no one around you modelled that.
If you grew up in a home where emotions were something to manage rather than to understand, this is for you. If you have spent years being the strong one, the composed one, the one who holds it all together — this is for you. If you have ever wondered why, even when everything in your life looks fine on the surface, something inside feels tired, or hollow, or like it is waiting for permission to be honest — this is for you.
What Comes Next
In the episodes that follow, I explore what it looks like to build a healthier relationship with our emotional lives. Not through advice that asks us to abandon our cultural values or our sense of responsibility to the people we love. But through an honest, grounded exploration of what it means to feel freely — without fear, without shame, without losing ourselves.
Because I believe that is possible. I believe that the same people who were taught to be strong have within them an extraordinary capacity for emotional courage — a different kind of strength, one that does not require hiding.
The conversation is just beginning.
Soul Immersion Conversations — Soch Vichaar is a podcast exploring the inner life — emotions, identity, healing, and what it means to live with greater self-awareness. New episodes released biweekly wherever you listen to podcasts.
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If something in this essay stayed with you — if you recognised yourself in these words, or felt something in you quietly say “this is me” — that recognition matters. It is worth paying attention to.
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