What am I feeling?

For many the question of ‘what am I feeling?’ is full of uncertainty and often a blank expression. Discovering a feeling or emotion can be challenging if we’ve hidden out so long that we aren’t even sure anymore. At one point, for me it wasn’t all that easy for me to answer that question as well. Over time through listening and being patient that has changed.

At first the experience for me was like going through a checklist. Do I feel happy? Do I feel angry? Do I feel sad? Am I frustrated? Am I lonely? Even a checklist was difficult because in some cases I wasn’t even sure what the feeling actually felt like. I even changed the questions to be more like does this feel like loneliness, or does this feel like frustration? It was also difficult because it was usually someone else asking the question and normally a response is expected fairly quickly. Since I didn’t know and I was using a checklist it could be 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds before I’m come to an answer. Fortunately most people were quite patient with me while I went through this process.

Identifying a single emotion or feeling within a few seconds became a major achievement. The checklist went quicker or I would use a shorter checklist of a category or grouping of feeling starting from a vague idea of what I might be feeling. Still it wasn’t automatic process.

Over time it did become smooth and easy. Over time I would ask myself the question in my head just as practice. Over time I knew what different feelings felt like. Over time I could identify more feelings and more textures of feelings as well.

Then I came to a confusing point where when someone would ask me what I was feeling, multiple feelings came up all at once and I didn’t know what to answer again. For a while it felt like I had gone backwards and suddenly I was back to taking 10 seconds to answer ‘what am I feeling?’ The confusion came because the normal expected answer is one feeling. I realized that I was going through the list and putting numbers to each feeling to find the most dominant one and assuming one feeling was what was wanted. It took a while to put this all together and understand what was happening. Truly I was feeling many things at once and that the answer to ‘what am I feeling’ could really have multiple answers.

Multiple feelings at once may seem like an unusual idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s normal. Consider bittersweet – a combination of feeling a fond memory and knowing it’s no longer there. Funerals and weddings are full of mixed feelings. Funerals have that same bittersweet quality but even more so. They can be full of love for the departed and love among the friends and family, and great sadness that they are no longer here. At a wedding there is such happiness from the parents as they see their beautiful children grown up, while also feeling some loss that their children are no longer little ones, but grown up.

 What are you feeling right now? All of them!