Big Feeler: Yena Sharma Purmasir Shares Her Feelings
Yena answers the inaugural Big Feels questionnaire! <3
Hi!! It’s Tahna. :)
Welcome to our inaugural Big Feeler: The Big Feels Questionnaire (this time with my dear friend and brilliant writer, Yena Sharma Purmasir!!).
I have always loved a good questionnaire/interview. As a kid in home-schooling, I would try to get all my work done by three in the afternoon: just in time to scramble in front of the television, sit cross-legged on the living room floor, and settle in to watch an hour of The Oprah Winfrey Show. It would become one of my favourite daydreams, to imagine myself sitting across from Oprah, talking back and forth about the story of my life. I suppose one could argue that those imaginary interviews served a similar purpose to what Big Feels is today, a way to work through the nuanced experience of what it means to being alive.
So, how will this work?
Well, in addition to our regularly scheduled programming (what you know as Big Feels now), I will also be inviting some creative/kind/interesting friends to fill out a little questionnaire that speaks to their life, their creative practice, their feelings, and whatever else is on their mind and in their heart.
I have a growing list of 20+ questions on this questionnaire. With these little take-overs, I’m asking my Big Feelers to choose 3-6 questions from the list and to share their answers with me (and you!!).
A Brief Love Note on Yena (she/her/hers):
I met Yena through my work with Party Trick Press (we published her collection OUR SYNONYMS: An Epic in 2022 — still some of my favourite poetry ever). I was an immediate fan, but am lucky enough to now call Yena a friend. To be able to talk about writing and creative life with Yena is always such an immense privilege. Her mind (and writing) is intricately adorned with all her careful observations, hard-earned truths, epiphanies (big and small), and treasured oddities. My life and writing is richer by being alive in the same timeline as her. <3
Now, without further ado, let’s give a warm Big Feels welcome to the endlessly fascinating and forever icon, Yena Sharma Purmasir!
Yena Sharma Purmasir is a poet and essayist from New York City. She is the author of Until I Learned What It Meant (Where Are You Press, 2013), When I’m Not There (self-published, 2016), OUR SYNONYMS: An Epic (Party Trick Press, 2022), and VIRAHA (Game Over Books, 2022). In 2020, she earned a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, where she focused on South Asian religious traditions. As the former Queens Teen Poet Laureate (2010-2011) and a lifelong New York snob, Yena now ironically and happily lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find her online and walking along the Charles River.
BIG FEELS: Who makes you laugh the hardest? Why?
YENA: My best friend, Vivian Chen. Vivian has been my best friend since I was ten years old and now we’re our 30s and it’s still true. There’s something about growing up with someone that makes humor this shared, evolving language. I think everything Vivian does is funny. She makes me laugh when she answers the phone in this sing-songy voice. She makes me laugh when she doesn’t answer my call and then calls me back but I misplaced my phone, so she has to leave me a voicemail message that sounds so exasperated and confused. When I tell Vivian a dark thought and she responds with “Yena please,” it’s impossible not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s funny—pun?—that when I saw this question, I knew right away what my answer would be, and now I’m struggling to communicate the why: the why is because Vivian is so pretty and so cute and somehow there’s this George Costanza goofball inside her that’s so unexpected if you don’t really know her—and I’m so lucky because I really know her.
BIG FEELS: What emotion is easier to feel (for you), anger or sadness? Why do you think this is?
YENA: Sadness is so much easier for me to feel than anger. I used to—and okay fine, still do—think anger was a bad, scary emotion. I didn’t like witnessing it in other people and I never wanted to be someone who sparked that kind of response in someone else. I learned in a Social Psychology class that anger is a secondary emotion, often hiding something underneath. The way the professor said it, it was like anger wasn’t the true feeling. By then, I was already Not Angry. Still, it cemented something for me: that I could bypass anger and go straight to the other thing: sadness, fear, confusion, whatever. The funny thing is, anger is also protective. Without it, I do feel defenseless. In a way my sadness, deep and painful as it is, is palatable. But I’m working on my anger, by which I mean I’m developing my ability to be angry. It turns out there is so much I’m angry about. Maybe I always was.
BIG FEELS: How do you take care of yourself when you are sad?
YENA: Ha, first I should clarify that I am sad a lot. I lean sad. And so the first thing I do when it hits me, is evaluate: what kind of sad is this? A tiny sad might mean I need to sink into it to move through it. Tiny sads are like when it’s raining and there’s a whisper of existential dread. Maybe something happened, but the reason it’s just a maybe is important. I listen to sad music for a bit and spend some time alone. This kind of care actually makes me feel less alone, more grounded. Then there are the big sads. Big sads might be because something happened, or because I have depression. The feeling here is deeper, worse, which is why I try not to lean into the feeling: no sad music or sad movies. This is when I think about comfort: watching something familiar and warm, eating something yummy, telling someone I love, “Hey I’m really sad today.” I’m an easy crier, in that I can start crying, like sobbing, at any point. And sometimes that feels good, to let it out. But sometimes it keeps me pinned in this immense grief. I put my hand on my chest when it feels that heavy. I talk to myself the way I’d talk to a child or a pet: “You’re okay. You’re right here.” Even though I don’t lean into the big sads, I don’t force them away either. The feeling lasts as long as it lasts. I’m patient with myself. And when it happens again, I remind myself I’ve felt this way before. It’ll pass.
BIG FEELS: Have you ever been in love? What does it feel like? Have you never been in love? What do you want love to feel like?
YENA: I am in love right now. I fell in love with him over a year ago. At first, it felt like a bolt of lightning. By that I mean, I was struck. We met when I didn’t expect to meet anyone. I had given up the possibility and, yes, I was lonely, but I wasn’t hopeful about it ever changing. It felt good being unhopeful. When we met, the first night we were together, in a tiny dorm room during our 10 year college reunion, I thought: at least I got to meet him. Then I thought: fuck, I’ll miss him. I didn’t think too much about the future, because I don’t think about the future. It’s hard to see myself there. But, after that first summer, into fall, I started thinking of the future, cautiously. What if? What if? What if? Now, being in love feels familiar—I think anyway, until I hear him laugh. Suddenly, it’s like the first time I heard him laugh, when all I wanted was to hear it again. Being loved in love is strange. Sometimes I see everything he is feeling all over his face, for me, and I am shocked, confused, touched. I am someone to my someone. It feels good. It feels funny. It feels like hope.
BIG FEELS: What is a lesson you keep learning over and over?
YENA: How to be a person. How to be myself. Growing up, I remember feeling like I was done. Like, this is who I am, I won’t change. I can see now that a big part of that was not wanting to be different or difficult. I was a good student forever. I was a good child forever. There were moments in my adolescence where I was really grappling with that, in the face of systemic inequality. I was exceptional, in that my goodness wasn’t what you’d expect out of me. I seemingly stayed in my lane. One day in 2009, in my AP Gov class, my teacher asked us to raise our hands if we identified as feminists. I was at one of the best public high schools in New York City, where the student population was more than 70% female. There were more than 30 students in that class. I was the only person who raised their hand. I remember that feeling of looking around and seeing the faces of people I had known for years in shock. Maybe they looked at me like that? In the weeks that followed, I asked my friends who weren’t in that class what they thought. And most of them said they weren’t feminists either. It was probably the first time that I realized, I’m not like everyone else. And I didn’t want to be. I mean, I didn’t want to be so alone and different either. But it was too late and I already was. This was sort of a coming out, which is only interesting because I didn’t come out this formally as queer. I came out as queer online and that was almost ten years ago, but I bet there are loads of people who know me who have no idea. That journey, just like all my journeys, was twisted and meandering and I’m still on it, so I have to resist the impulse to tie it up neatly. That’s what I mean. I know on some level who I am is just becoming, and also that who I am has been screaming for space and time. Like, I’ve always been a writer. But I had these dreams where I could swim, even though in real life I couldn’t swim. And then this summer, for reasons I don’t understand, I took myself to the public pool, week after week, and taught myself to tread, to put my face in, to move my young, imperfect body. Now I’m someone who can swim. Verbs are so interesting. Maybe I’m someone who can do anything.
BIG FEELS: Have you ever had a profound or particularly striking dream? What was its message?
YENA: In 2018, 17 years after my father died, I had a dream that he was alive. Like, he came back to life? Or, he was never really dead? He was just gone? But it was a discovery in the dream. I was working a summer camp job, though the location wasn’t at camp, because dreams are like that. I couldn’t get out of work though. Capitalism prevails even in dreams. My mom told me she’d bring my dad to the location, where I guess I had to work some kid’s birthday party. And partway through the party, my mom and dad showed up. He was still in a wheelchair. I saw him and I waved? I smiled? I didn’t touch him though. I had to do something with these kids. But I was aware of where he was in the room. And then there was the cake or whatever, the dream moved on. Later, I went up to my mom and asked where my dad went off to, because I had finished working, I was ready, finally, to see him, hug him, all of it. But she looked at me, confused, and explained that he was gone. It had only been for that one night. He was dead again. Or gone again. Whatever it was, I had missed it. I had missed it because I was working some stupid job that didn’t even make sense. I remember crying so hard, I woke up, and then in real life, I cried too. It felt like losing him all over again. I tried talking to a friend about it, a friend with two living parents, and saying what I thought it meant: which is that I missed my chance. I have fucked up priorities. I should’ve quite the dream job, even if it was my actual, literal dream job. Jobs are just jobs. Work is just work. My dad was my favorite person. I should’ve left the summer camp birthday party and gone up to him, running.
BIG FEELS: Is there a cause/person/program/account doing good work that you would like to amplify?
YENA: Impossible Light, a mutual aid organization providing direct relief to Gaza.
For more, follow Yena on Instagram @yenasharmapurmasir and BUY HER BOOKS!
VIRAHA is here and OUR SYNONYMS: An Epic is here. <3
Until next time! xo
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K bye. :)
So excited to read these interviews as they come, and so excited you started with Yena who I adore!!