RealFeel
(Mis)interpreting the weather app for very human conditions.
Hello & thanks for reading Permission Slips! A few upcoming events/notes:
Intuitive & Free, an Equine Immersion / Embodied Writing Retreat, September 19-21, 2025. Join us at Driftwood, a beautiful horse ranch in Northfield, New Hampshire, to combine the gentle, joyful practice of somatic creativity with the wise sensitivity of horses.
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy Assoc. of North America Conference, Sept. 4-7, 2025. I’ll be one of the featured speakers on opening night - please say hello if you’re there!
Last week, after a long stretch of rain and cool, a spring Nor’easter swept through, turning the weather more extreme. We were back in parkas and sweaters, cranking the woodstove in late May. Cute, in November, but after months of cold, plainly rude.
I took screenshots of our weather reports and sent them to friends and family around the country, circling “Feels like” in red. “Real feel: 35! Crying emoji.” “Real feel: 25! Can you even with this?”
“Feels like” or RealFeel is a weather calculation designed to convey how going outside actually feels, adjusting measurable temperature to account for things like humidity, wind, cloud cover, angle of the sun. Sure it’s 48 degrees, but it feels like 29. I started imagining how we might use this scientific conversion of fact into feeling for other aspects of our life. A changing figure, depending on the conditions of the moment.
Outward mood: Fine. RealFeel: Heartbroken for the world.
Age: 47. RealFeel: 14 and 80, simultaneously.
I missed one crucial calculation.
Because on Friday, feeling a bit of a sore throat and a swollen lymph node, I made the absolutely rookie mistake of Googling my symptoms (I know, I know). To be fair, the biologic medication I’m on for Crohn’s disease comes with a long list of things to fear. It’s advertised in commercials of happy people kayaking while the voiceover spends nearly as much time talking about the benefits as the absolutely fatal side effects.
Which Google, in its predictable algorithmic amalgamations, naturally confirmed. And off I went:
- 5 a.m.: Read through the list of terrible, terminal probable outcomes
- 6 a.m.: Figured I should get my affairs in order, prepare for inevitable, imminent exit.
- 10 a.m.: Get to the doctor’s office. Ask the nurse, joking/not joking, how many months I might have left.
But seated there, describing my actual symptoms, reality began to catch up. No fever, or aches, no shortness of breath, tiredness but not exhaustion. I had a small cold, and actually felt mostly fine. Ohhh.
“You think I’m gonna pull through?” I asked.
The nurse smiled. “Yes, I think so.”
Swabbed and reassured and feeling better, I started wondering which part was RealFeel. My actual symptoms? Or the anxiety that invaded my body when I was sure my time was nigh? Both felt very real. Temperature outside: Minor symptoms. RealFeel: 5 alarm fire.
What a wild mess my mind had made, pulling me into a tumultuous, high stakes spin. True, my vigilance was well earned. My nervous system has, let’s say, seen some stuff. But I could only summon this compassion in the rearview mirror of hindsight.
We aren’t weather systems. Here in the human realm, our emotional states are twizzled up with our physical bodies, our histories, our hearts, our diagnoses. It’s difficult to practice discernment, with the sirens going off.
Which perhaps explains some of our overwhelm writ large. So often we shrink our RealFeel to outrage or panic, missing what’s also here: Tender, complex beings navigating every kind of weather.
RealFealin this!