We Need Better Language For Emotions

Feelings are messy. That's what's so difficult about that.

That's also what's so amazing about them. Anyone who has ever experienced the absolute delight of messy, teary-eyed joy knows what I am talking about. The best emotional experiences do not come in polite little laughs.

Actually, just take laughter. The most intense laughter is not pretty. It involves snorting, tears, snot, choking on your drink and, in some epic cases, said drink coming out through your nose. There is nothing unmessy about a profound laugh.

Another way feelings are messy is that they mix and change a lot. We can feel many things at the same time. Some of those things feel similar, even though they are completely different. Sadness can feel like anger. Excitement can feel like fear. Joy can feel like confusion.

But what makes feelings the most difficult is the lack of precision we use when we describe them in our everyday experience. Most of the time, we don't use very many words beyond the main category. Anger is just anger. Sadness is just sadness.

We can’t process what we can’t talk about so a lot of the time, we get stuck with out feelings.

Describing our inner landscape in these broad strokes is like trying to buy paint and just saying "grey”.

The other day, we went to buy dark grey color to paint Adam’s office. I was amazed how different the greys we saw at the store looked when we held them up against the furniture.

Even among the subset of "the darkest grey", there was a lot of variety. There were warm greys and cold greys. Greys with red undertones, greys with a bit of yellow, greys that looked green when held up against the wall, blue-ish greys and purple greys. The difference seemed very subtle at first, but once we held them up against different backgrounds, it turned out that even the darkest greys look very, very different.

We ended up buying a colour named "witchcraft", a dark grey with turquoise undertones. It looks amazing.

Our feelings are just as intricately different as those dark greys on the sample card in the store. There are many varieties of each, they mix, they interact, and depending on the context, they look just as different the greys.

If we don’t find ways to talk about our emotions with more precision, we’ll just end up with “any grey color” or “any red color” on the wall.