How Does It Feel

One of the reasons that I don't like trying to tell people about what I'm feeling is because I know they can never possibly understand. No matter how much I can describe how I feel even though I hardly ever do, that's only the way I know how to convey it. They can't know exactly how I feel; how sad or how happy. Emotions are weird. We have words for them like happy or sad, but those words can't capture every type of feeling you can have. And it's rare that you only feel one emotion at a time. Plus there's always going to be a time when even you don't know how you feel. I know talking about it is supposed to help, but even so whoever you talk to can say they understand as many times as they want to but that's to make you feel better and not alone.

We talked about this in my TOK class last year although we mostly talked about trying to convey our feelings of physical pain. Let's say hypothetically you get shot and someone asks you to explain how it felt. You can use all the words you can possibly think of to describe it but they'll never know how it felt unless it happens to them. And even then they would most likely describe it differently than you did.

This is also the same with emotions and mental state. People can ask all they want how you feel and no matter what you say, all they can do is try and relate what you're saying to their experiences. Even if they have gone through the same exact thing as you have, they still won't feel everything the way you did. Part of this is how we interpret what's going on. While someone may be really bothered by something happening, another person could be okay with the same exact thing happening to them. I realize that I get stressed out about pretty much anything and I don't want to tell someone how much something is bothering me only to get that vibe that they're thinking Wow that is so unimportant why does it matter so much to her. We can believe all we want that we understand how someone feels, but it's just not possible.