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. ...