Girl on the Net

How do you feel right now, emotionally? If you came up with something like ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ or ‘angry’, can you drill down a little deeper into that emotion? Is it possible to identify what’s causing it, or is it a vague sense that you can’t explain? Are there other feelings swirling around to keep that first one company? Or even ones that seem to exist in conflict with it? It’s possible, after all, to feel both angry and content – one an immediate flash of something bad, set against a backdrop of a life that’s otherwise giving you all the things you need. How good are you at identifying your emotions? In how much detail could you answer the question: how do you feel right now?

I’m a little obsessed with asking people how they feel. I’ve been (gently) mocked for it by friends a few times in the past. Although a ‘fine’ is acceptable from a stranger, if we’re talking about someone I love, generally I’m looking for a far more expansive answer.

Some of my friends give expansive answers instinctively, like I do. If we’re close, a conversation like the following is not uncommon:

Me: How are you at the mo?

Them: I’m pretty stressed with work, but absolutely loving family life – feeling very content at home and my relationship with [Partner] is going really well. They got me takeaway the other day when I’d had a bad meeting, which made me feel incredibly loved. There’s a worry in my mind about [Parent], of course, they’re still ill and I’m frustrated that there seems to be so little I can do.

This is condensed, but it gives you an idea. I’m grateful to be surrounded by many friends who can identify and articulate their feelings. It gives me a window into what’s going on in their head, and guides me in how best to be a friend to them in this moment. Depending on their answer to the question ‘how do you feel?’ I could offer encouragement, sympathy or confidence-boosting compliments. I might offer to take them out for a drink or burn their workplace to the ground, and sometimes I’ll launch into further questions to help tease out the detail.

For me, no matter whether my feelings are good ones or bad, what I mostly want from a friend is to be given the space to talk about them. Say them aloud. Explore the colour of each emotion, the intensity of it and where it’s directed. I want to be given the chance to embark on the exercise I gave you in the first paragraph: articulate the way I am feeling, without any expectations that I ‘should’ feel this way or that.

Before I get into the detail of this post, I need to stress that I’m not an expert in brains and how they work. I have no qualifications in counselling, therapy or anything of the kind. If you want a more scientific take on emotions, you should check out this wonderful and moving book – Emotional Intelligence – by my neuroscientist pal Dean Burnett. But in this blog I am not telling you how everyone’s mind works, and I’m certainly not trying to give advice on how everybody should think and feel. There will also be different types of neurodivergence which mean the way you see and process your emotions may be radically different from mine. Occasionally people have tried to diagnose me from a distance with various types of neurodivergence, but I have never spoken to my doctor about this and I don’t honestly think I fall far from the neurotypical tree, so that’s where I’m coming from. I’m basically just having a go at doing with emotions what I often do with sex: share some things about my own experience, in the hope that if it resonates with one or two of you it might prove useful. If it doesn’t feel useful to you (which it may not, especially if your brain – and your partners’ brains – don’t work the same as mine) then feel free to ignore and move along.

Your emotional palette: how do you feel?

I conceive of my own emotional landscape a bit like a map or a painting. When I have disagreements with loved ones, I often find myself saying things like ‘give me a couple of minutes to explain this in detail, please’ or ‘I just want to paint you a picture.’ If someone asks me ‘how do you feel?’ and gives space for a truly honest answer, I’ll usually see a map made up of various colours: emotions of different hues (anger! Sadness! Worry!), intensities (the more vivid the colour, the stronger the emotion), sizes (big worries take up more visual space than small ones, of course), and distances relative to me (some sadness hovers in the background from weeks ago, and looks distinctly different to the vivid, raw unhappiness of right now). If someone asks me ‘how do you feel?’ there is never one single emotion – there’s a map painted in many colours, of different hues and intensities.

My emotional palette has become more detailed and complex over the years. Either that, or I’ve just become better at using it. Identifying and articulating the subtle differences between similar feelings, say, embarrassment and humiliation. When I was a child, I’d have told you I was feeling ‘angry’ or ‘sad’, but obviously I didn’t have the language to articulate more granular detail.

The best example of this is frustration, I think. If you’ve ever met a toddler you know that they can definitely feel frustrated, but ‘frustration’ is a complex word and a challenging sentiment – it can be hard for a three-year-old to tell you that’s how they feel, so they’ll plump for ‘sad’ or ‘angry’, because those are the closest words they know. Grown-ups have more colours in our emotional palette, as well as words to describe what they mean. If you’re struggling to visualise this, check out the wheel of emotions, the original purpose of which I actually don’t know, but which I find handy for expressing this concept. It isn’t a scientific chart – emotions aren’t discrete and easily categorisable like that – but it demonstrates fairly neatly how things like ‘sadness’ can be examined to reveal more nuanced emotions – guilt, despair, hurt, loneliness, whatever.

What do your emotions look like?

I don’t expect anyone to articulate their feelings in as much detail, and as often, as I do. I literally made this my job! I do it all the time in private too! I am painfully annoying in a number of ways! I am not an expert by any means but – as with sex – I’m definitely an experienced enthusiast. I pay a lot of attention to how I feel, noting the detail and nuance that distinguishes things which, earlier in life, I might have instinctively labeled the same.

For example:

Let’s say I feel jealous about a man I’m dating, we’ll call him X. He’s a sexy man and other people often want to bang him. The colour of this jealousy is tinged with insecurity – my feelings here don’t necessarily stem from a lack of trust, but from a sense that I am somehow not quite good enough, and both of us know it. There’s fear there, too: a fear of the unknown. We’ve not been dating very long so his behaviour is unpredictable to me. Self-disgust is in there, as is disappointment, because I want to be cool and nonchalant, so any hint of jealousy is also a cause for shame. Shame! That’s in there too. When I picture the map of this particular jealousy, it’s mostly dark green tinged with grey (the fear), a few spots of red (self-disgust, shame) splattered here and there to keep it company. Examining the map in detail I wonder if I could help to ease the jealousy by simply telling this man that I’m feeling insecure, and asking him what he could offer by way of reassurance.

Compare this to the jealousy I used to feel about a different guy, Y. This emotion would usually be coloured with an element of bitterness: it cropped up when he did things with other women that he’d refused to do with me (nothing serious, just stuff like ‘go out for cocktails’ or ‘pay for her to get a taxi home if it was late’). The intensity of that colour, though, is softened by a corresponding emotion: trust. A sense of calm comfort. I didn’t believe Y would cheat on me, and I had years of experience to back that up. There are other emotions sitting beneath the jealousy that help explain why it’s there: loneliness, lust, boredom even. Bitterness is dark blue but painted against a wash of softening purple (for the calm). Loneliness is a lighter blue, and boredom bluer still. Lust is likely garish pink, so just splatter that wherever you like to make sure you get the full picture. Examining it I can see that there are aspects that might benefit from a particular conversation with him: tell him ‘I’m feeling a bit lonely and left out, may I have some attention?’

Although in both cases I am feeling jealousy in a broad sense, the internal painting that corresponds to that emotion looks radically different depending on context. Different enough that, if we had more words in our language, I’d say they were separate emotions. As it is, I think it’s fine to call them both jealousy, as long as I can identify that solving each instance means acknowledging that I have very different needs from X as opposed to Y.

Emotional depth and complexity

What I’m talking about here is not a science. There are ways to explore emotions scientifically, but on a day to day level all of us have feelings that we process and deal with in our own ways so talking about how we do that is worthwhile, I think, even from a layperson’s perspective. Sometimes we examine our emotions, talk about them, express them through art or diaries or whatever. Occasionally we shut them away or try to suppress them. Some of us – and this is extremely gendered so it would be strange if I didn’t mention it – are taught to explore them in detail, become comfortable with our own and other people’s. Some are punished for showing more than a very limited set of feelings, so they don’t get the same opportunities to explore their emotional maps the way others do.

One of the questions I’m fascinated by, when it comes to our emotional life, is: what turns our emotions from simple to complex? Is it purely about growing up and learning more words? Does the very act of labelling feelings make you more likely to experience each one? Do we only increase our emotional palette through the act of using it? Maybe as we dabble each blob of paint on a new emotional picture, we become familiar with the colours and start seeing subtle differences in tone. The light yellow of excitement for a trip to a theme park is now distinguishable from the slightly more orange thrill that represents a trip to watch your partner perform on stage for the very first time. The hues are not exactly the same, and each one contributes differently to the overall emotional picture you’d paint as you wake up with butterflies in your stomach on the morning of whichever event.

Obviously I know that both my colour palette, and my emotional maps, have become more detailed over time. Some of that is because I’ve learned new words or discovered new things, but some is definitely practice. Journalling and blogging and doing therapy and talking to my friends and lovers: paying significant attention to what’s going on in my head. Zooming in on the details makes me realise that each picture’s more complex than I originally thought.

If the ‘colour’ analogy’s not grabbing you, you might prefer to think in terms of pixels. As a child I saw in 8-bit, and now we’re in standard definition. God help the people around me when I’m sixty and I’ve made it to HD: it already takes ages to paint an emotional picture these days because I’m so used to zooming in on complexity. If someone asks ‘how are you?’ and wants an honest answer, I feel like I’m lying by omission if my response doesn’t run into paragraphs.

I’m not saying you’re a liar if you don’t do this, of course. Just that I feel like one if I answer with too much simplicity. I spend so much time doing this sort of thing that when someone asks me a sincere question about the way I feel, I want to give as accurate a representation of my feelings as possible. To some people this is deeply annoying, and I get that, but it’s quite a core part of who I am so if you hate it then you probably shouldn’t be my friend. In fact, if you hate it, why are you reading this blog? Shoo! Go on! Get out of it!

Talking about your feelings is a skill

Although I am not telling everyone to do exactly the same as me (as an ex of mine once said: “I just don’t physically have that in me”), I do think most people could benefit from spending a bit more time exploring their feelings. People have often told me I am emotional or sensitive or whatever, and I’m sure some of that is a product of my upbringing, but some of it is also learned through practice.

Identifying and articulating your emotions is a skill. It’s a useful one, and it’s one most people can learn if they have the time, space and inclination. If you find yourself frequently unable to put your finger on why you feel good or bad in this exact moment, as always I recommend picking up a diary (or writing notes in your phone or on your laptop) and having a go at exploring your emotional landscape. Paint your pictures. Write how you feel (or make voice notes). Get used to spending time with your anger or your sadness (or, more fun: your love or lust!) and really dive into the specifics. Why do I feel this way? How intense is the feeling? For how long have I had it? What is causing it? Do I even know? Which other feelings are associated with it? Are there other points in the past where a similar feeling (or colourful map of mixed feelings) has cropped up?

I think this self-knowledge can be powerful, and practicing it can help you to know yourself better, as well as articulate your needs and desires to the people who love you.

When we talk about emotional intelligence, or emotional maturity, it’s often discussed as if it’s an innate skill or something that magically appears when we hit a certain age or certain life events happen, but I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. Just as programmers don’t wake up one morning suddenly better at writing code because they’ve had ten years of experience, so understanding and articulating our emotions is not an ability that simply pops into our skillset once we’ve lived a long enough life. It isn’t pure instinct either: programmers weren’t born knowing php, they learned it. Some people might be better set up to learn code, but everyone who knows it had to use it and practice until they became fluent.

Emotional maturity, intelligence, whatever you want to call it: the ability to recognise and articulate our own emotions. That is a skill. One we can be taught from an early age, for sure, or one that’s sometimes crushed out of us by rigid policing of who is and isn’t allowed to openly feel. But it’s a skill nonetheless, and it’s worth spending time on. You’re allowed to spend time on it. For yourself, of course, because understanding yourself better is a gift in its own right, but also for the people around you. Because I think – your mileage may vary – that the best way to love someone starts with understanding their emotional landscape. If you want to truly love and be loved, you need to share your maps.

Part 2 coming at some point soon.