Is it an annoyance about people vocalizing their feelings? No, not in the least. People maybe ought to be more aware of their feelings and vocalize them more often. Some people, at least. I'm also not advocating putting substantive conversation entirely in the vernacular of feeling-talk, which I think would annoy me as well.
So now I get closer to the heart of it, which is a >misuse< of feeling-talk.
I remember the time I heard someone say this most recently that got my ire up. I was listening to NPR in the morning, and there was a discussion about some political matter (the exact nature of which I don't recall) on which there were opposing viewpoints. And in an interview with one of the disputants, he or she started with a "What I'm feeling is..." and then continued to give some assertion of fact, like "the representative is a dickhead."
(stream of consciousness association to the movie "Taladega Nights" when WIll Farrell's character says: "With all due respect, I didn't realize you'd gotten experimental surgery to get your balls removed," and the character he says that to gets annoyed and replies something like "saying 'with all due respect' doesn't mean you can go on to say anything you want to say.")
Ok, so back to a misuse of "what I'm >feeling< is...". To MY mind, that kind of preface leads the way to generally emotional kinds of talk: "I'm feeling hurt by what you said," "I'm feeling joy at the awesome epiphany you experienced." Maybe even semi-cognitive kinds of talk: "I'm feeling confused about what you mean."
In these kinds of situations, the claims are fairly uncontestable. If a person feels joy, or anger, or hurt, or confusion, and truthfully reports on that, there's not much room to say the person is wrong. There >are< things to say - such as to apologize if the case is that you've done something to hurt another's feelings, or seek to be more clear if a listener is confused. Also, it's possible that the event triggering an emotional response was perceived incorrectly, maybe the listener misheard what was said, for instance, and that can be discussed, too.
And I'd still like to leave some small room for critique. I mean, if a person says something like "I'm feeling so happy that you just kicked that stray dog for no reason," I hope someone would point out that there are things that not appropriate to be happy about. I mean, to put it another way, there are at least two different things that it's good to keep distinct: (1) an authentic awareness of one's emotional state, and (2) a mindfulness in connecting up appropriate emotional states with the things that trigger them. I mean, again (x3), if for example a person feels "dissed," or deeply hurt or offended by every negative word, well, he or she's not connecting the dots right. But that starts to get complicated and threatens to veer me off-topic so I'll just leave that there.
So, to recap where I'm at now: "what I'm >feeling< is..." to my ear, signals an upcoming report of the speaker's emotional or quasi-cognitive state. And as truthful reporting of what the speaker subjectively experiences, is, in that respect, largely immune from critique. In short: it just is, what it is.
Ok, fine. So what's the annoyance factor?
The extension of the phrase to places it doesn't belong. Sometimes, in the case of someone who is mildly clever, I imagine that she might detect the seemingly protective function of "what I'm >feeling< is..." and follow that up with an assertion of fact rather than an emotional subjective state - you know, like, "what I'm feeling is that you're a douche." I cannot recount the number of times, as a teacher, I heard this kind of thing from students. It was maddening. Well, they didn't call me a douche (at least, not to my face). It would be more like "what I'm feeling is that you graded me wrongly on this paper and you should give me an 'A'," or "what I'm feeling is that feminists hate all men and their claims ought to be rejected wholesale on that basis."
In these cases, what we have is a claim that calls for argument and defense, where the proclaimer attempts to avoid that difficult work by being prefacing it by "what I'm >feeling<...." That there is an avoidance factor is clear when in discussion you try and coax out the person's reasons, and the response is "that's just what I feel." What a nice bit of rhetoric. How simple! No being held to account needed! Not. And I find that kind of laziness to give reasons for what one >believes< (not: feels) annoying.
Which brings me to a second element of annoyance: a kind of laziness to take careful inventory of the sorts of mental states we have. Every mental state is not a feeling. We've got beliefs, thoughts, questions, fantasies. All sorts of stuff, and who knows, maybe they all come with an emotional component, but that doesn't make them all feelings. And it frustrates me to see conversation turned into one-dimensional emotional discourse. "I'm feeling you're wrong for giving me a 'B-' on this paper; I feel I deserve an 'A'." "I feel you're wrong for feeling you deserve an 'A'." What else is there to do with that? And doesn't that dilute the significance of feeling-talk where it is legitimate? I kinda think it might.
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