emotion

This isn't so much a poem as just. An essay I wrote on emotions.

Emotion Theory

Emotions are a circle, and that's something I've been looking into a lot lately. At first, I thought it was a spectrum, that there are lines, but then I realized that there's no room for one emotion to mix with more than two, and I felt like that wouldn't work well. There's a blending of two emotions, but there is no way to mix more than that. There are ways to feel lots of emotions at once and I think as well as that, there are ways to mix emotions that oppose each other. Happiness and sadness create bittersweet. Anger and fear create hatred and unacceptance. So while the circle of emotions doesn't completely give an accurate representation of emotion, it can be adjusted. I also recognize that I don't feel every human experience in the world and different people experience different emotions and reactions to things. This is simply put, my interpretation of emotion and the new Feeling I've been learning to experience.
    This emotion sits everywhere between Ecstacy, Admiration, Terror, Amazement, and Grief. Where most people would interpret emotion as a dot that would have a place on the diagram, this Feeling is a half circle, encompassing it all and everything in between. This Feeling is something I love, something I have given myself to, something I am in awe in, and something that always leaves me disappointed, nonetheless. It's a cause and effect, and it always leaves me in Grief.

How The Feeling Progresses

    It starts when something (a trigger, a cause) reaches me. Generally, this is something I hear or see. A song or a sign from my childhood that I haven't seen in years. Usually, I am able to pass this trigger without having any sort of Feeling come with it, but sometimes I will feel it. It feels like nostalgia, it is nostalgia, but nostalgia, as defined, is, "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations." However, this Feeling as I'm experiencing is much more intense than just that. It is nostalgia, but intense, it is a flashback. And for a moment you're living in that moment, you're feeling everything you felt and you can feel yourself there. Just for a moment. And that moment is something I can't describe quite yet. It's intense, and it's a feeling that isn't in the dictionary. It isn't seeing oyur own childhood,  it's being in your own childhood and feeling the exact thing you did then, but there's a blanket over that. Intensity, and it's something that is there for a second and gone the next.
    After the Feeling passes, there are two ways for this to go. The good way, and the bad way. First, is the bad way, the one I used to feel more often than not. The following moments after the Feeling are dreadful, they're grieving the loss of the Feeling and wanting to feel it again, it's wanting to know that emotion, struggling through the curiosity of something you may never understand. It's feeling lost without it and unsure of where to go. It's hiraeth (a Welsh word for missing home) except it's missing a home you never had. Then after maybe a couple minutes of grief, you move on. You go on with your day, and it stays in your mind, but only until you sleep and eventually you forget. It was just a weird experience and it's over.
    The second way is the good way. This means that the Feeling is over but not completely. You feel it intense for a second, and then you feel it less intense. You recall memories you barely remember having and specific moments that don't mean much but still are vivid. Today, I had a case of this, listening to Almost Here by The Academy Is... which is something I listened to when I was depressed, and also reminds me of an early 2000s childhood. It has that hard to describe genre to it. However, as I was experiencing the good aftermath of the feeling, I was nostalgic not only for 2017, being depressed and bus rides and listening to that same song, but I also became nostalgic for when I was five or six years old, riding in the car in Downtown Spokane (which is where I also rode the bus) and going to the large brick GroupHealth building where I would go for checkups by my doctor. I feel like the emotion that goes with the good aftermath is better visualized. If white is no emotion and yellow is ecstasy, it's a light yellow. It's a buzz that is apparent but doesn't completely disrupt what you're doing. As well as this, there is another emotion that's common to feel, but this one is hard to describe. I think that part is the longingness for home, for something you want to return to. But you're not necessarily sad about it, just feeling it and being okay with that feeling.

Spectrum of Nostalgia
    Finally, there is one last part of this, and that's the different emotions within nostalgia. This is the best way, I've found, to explain it. Let's say nostalgia is a spectrum.

When I feel a specific memory, it represents itself as a line in the spectrum.

This is one memory I have. Generally, I experience the same few memories several times. However, with how I felt it today, it could be seen as two white lines, one where the first one is, and another in the green. They're completely unrelated memories, but they're on the same spectrum, and therefore somehow related. I don't believe I could name a specific memory for each place on the spectrum because it's such an unstable model at the moment, but it's the best I have. I might start to make a list of all the vivid imagery that happens when I experience these types of memories.

It's like deja vu, but I'm not repeating anything.

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