4. The Emotions Wheel
In the feels
Email correspondences: old and new
My mom recently unearthed a series of emails I’d written to her in middle school. One asked if I could shave my legs. Another asked if I could wear a bra to school since I had to change for gym and cross country.
While it felt impossible for me to voice these questions aloud, it was a little easier to compose emails on the family desktop in The Computer Room and wait for my mom to open them in a matter of hours.
Even now, relaying information in written form feels infinitely more doable than in person. When I finally told my parents I’d been diagnosed with anorexia during the pandemic, I simply sent an email late at night with the subject line: Update.
I could not bear to call.
My mom and I have not always been the best face-to-face communicators, but our relationship has evolved and deepened through writing—often in the form of email correspondence.
April is National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), a challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days. My poet-mother has been participating for years and when April rolls around, she often sends me her poems in progress. Recently, she wrote a sonnet inspired by the contents of my childhood bedroom and one of our shared favorite songs, Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.” She titled her poem “Remnants of the Revolving Years.”
It arrived in my inbox on a Saturday evening. I read it in my kitchen and started crying while my boyfriend set up a Netflix show in the next room. He came back to find me weeping and, alarmed, asked, “What happened?”
I could only respond truthfully, “Nothing.” No action had taken place. I did not open an email revealing painful news or tragedy. All I could say in response was, “My mom wrote a poem about me.”
I shared this story with my sister Anna, and she recounted a time when my mom recorded a video of herself reading The Going to Bed Book and sent it to my sister and me; we watched my mother’s weathered hands turn the cardboard pages of this beloved book as she narrated aloud. Anna opened the video as she was getting undressed to put on her pajamas, and her college roommates opened her door to find her sobbing uncontrollably in just her underwear.
The Circle Game
I have to laugh at myself and the fact that anything can set me off. My boyfriend joked, “Next time, I’ll just ask if they’re happy tears or sad tears.” But, sometimes, they’re something else, an emotion difficult to identify in name and intensity. In-between tears.
In eating disorder treatment, when you don’t know how you’re feeling, they whip out The Emotions Wheel. It’s a Sherwin-Williams display of tinted emotional paint chips: you can start from the inside of the wheel and work out, or read around the edge and then identify the “core emotion” your chosen feeling stems from.
In treatment, we talk about emotions constantly. The grief of mourning your ideal body. The anxiety of challenging an eating disorder thought. The shame of engaging in a behavior dictated by your illness. The guilt of simply enjoying food. The deeply-held hope for recovery. The fleeting comfort of a maladaptive behavior. The elation of connecting over shared experience.
Each day of treatment, I participated in a “relational check-in,” where I shared with the group an emotion I was coming in with and how that might land for others. Dialectical behavior therapy gave me the vocabulary and tools to name and regulate my emotions. And yet, The Emotions Wheel in all its many hues falls short in representing the spectrum of human emotion.
Naming the unnamed
I’ve talked with several people recently who resonated with Adam Grant’s recent New York Times article, “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing.” Grant tells us that
Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being.
Grant suggests that languishing may be the dominant emotion of 2021: the pandemic continues to drag on, many of us are still working from home one Blursday after another, and we feel blah/meh/ugh all the time. It is so validating to have a name for that. A response to the question, “How are you?” that reflects the near universal experience of right now without disingenuously answering “Okay,” but rather, “I’m languishing.”
Inspired by this new addition to my feelings lexicon, I made my own little emotions wheel to name some of my feels that are harder to identify and seem absent from our typical buffet of feelings. Maybe you have felt these too.
Flatness: akin to languishing, this feeling dominated my winter of 2021. I felt so weighed down by the world and lacked the motivation to do much of anything. I’ve been trying to find ways to pull myself out of this feeling: embroidery, writing, cutting my hair; sometimes they work and sometimes they backfire, but at least I can name the unbearable flatness of being.
Nostalgia in Sepia: moved by the inevitable passage of time; sentimentality toward eras past and the quintessence of childhood; how I feel when I listen to The Circle Game. I also feel this wistful affection for experiences and eras I didn’t actually live through that somehow still hit home: like when I watch My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks or when I remember high school as being a less painful time than it actually was.
Emotional Myopia: consumed by my own nearsightedness and inability to parse the bigger picture; like putting together a puzzle of an impressionist painting, the brushstrokes on each piece make it difficult to see how two pieces fit together, let alone what the final product might be, because I’m so consumed by the texture of one individual piece.
Sonder: I was introduced to this concept by my best friend in college; the entry in John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines sonder as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.” This feeling is particularly strong for me on trains and public transportation; we are all just slipping into and out of each other’s lives, and this realization jolts me out of my self-absorption, or perhaps, my emotional myopia.
Iktsuarpok: an Inuit word for the feeling of anticipation when visitors are about to arrive. As a chronic waiter, I have a bad habit of putting my entire life on hold when I’m waiting for someone else. I am unable to go about my life, and I’m left feeling frustrated that I’ve wasted time and frittered away my day—I couldn’t possibly do anything but scroll on my phone for I will surely be interrupted at any moment so what would the point be of trying to do something productive! Of course, the rest of the world does not wait for me, so I really pay for my iktsuarpok twice. Still, there’s a feeling of excitement and anticipatory joy in the waiting for others, and I’m not sure I’d trade that for productivity.
Toska: Russian for deep yearning, insatiable searching triggered by the vastness of the Great European Plains. I felt this intensely as I drove through the severe landscape of Iceland with my best friend after college. Iceland holds a surreal, forbidding beauty. It elicited a deep searchingness within me, as if there was more to the world than the life I would return to, yet not enough time to figure out what that more was. (Oh the post-collegiate quest to find oneself…)
The Opposite of Loneliness: see Marina Keegan: “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.” I have nothing to add. She said it perfectly.
Awumbuk: the feeling of emptiness after a visitor departs, named by the indigenous Baining People who live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. According to Jane Fajan in her book They Make Themselves, “The experience [of awumbuk] is conceptualized as a physical indisposition, a heaviness. This ‘heaviness’ is caused by the departing visitors who go off lightly and leave this weight behind.” It’s been a while since I’ve had a party at my home, but I always feel an energy void once everyone has left. I miss the effervescence, the liveliness and brightness of people. Their absence settles in my body like dust or gloom. It is hard to leave, but it is also hard to be left behind.
That’s all for today. I hope you are regulating your emotions better than I was 6 months ago. <3