A list of emotions I keep coming back to

I started keeping a list of emotions because I realised I didn’t have names for half the things I was feeling. Not clinical names — just everyday words that would let me say “I’m feeling X” instead of “I don’t know what’s wrong but something is.”

It sounds simple, but most people never build that vocabulary. We grow up with maybe twenty or thirty emotion words and then we just reuse them forever. Happy, sad, angry, stressed. That’s it. When something more specific comes up — like the particular flavour of disappointment you get when someone forgets your birthday but you pretend it didn’t matter — you don’t have a word for it. So you just sit with it, unnamed, and it gets heavier.

This list isn’t comprehensive. It’s the ones I found myself reaching for, or the ones I wished I’d had available. Some of them are obvious. Some I had to look up because they described something I’d felt but never put a name to.

Some of these overlap — envy and jealousy, empathy and sympathy, courage and bravery — but I kept them separate because they feel different in your body even if dictionaries treat them as the same. Envy wants what someone else has. Jealousy fears losing something you already have. One is hunger, the other is fear.

I also left out a few that didn’t make the cut because they felt too clinical or too narrow. Schadenfreude, for instance — the pleasure you get from someone else’s misfortune. I’ve felt it. I don’t want to give it a fancy German word and make it sound respectable.

The point of the list wasn’t to be exhaustive. It was to have words ready when I needed them. Because once you can name what you’re feeling, it stops being this shapeless weight and starts being something you can actually deal with.