Why It’s So Hard To Talk About Feelings

When people ask “what’s wrong?” that’s actually the most difficult question to answer. Feelings don’t have reasons. They are, by definition, unreasonable.

Take my dog, for example. Sometimes she’s behaving extra ratchet, stealing food or humping stuffed animals. These are feelings, but she doesn’t need doggy therapy. She just needs a walk.

Or take my son. He’ll get really worked up about the wrong color plate, but we don’t need to talk about it. Psychoanalysis of toddlers just makes things worse. We just change the plate, or distract him and move on.

My point here is that animals and children obviously don’t have words for their feelings, but we take it for granted that adults do. And we don’t. Marriage has taught me that.

My wife and I have been having the same few fights for nearly a decade, usually about food. These fights never get ‘solved’ because it’s never really about what we’re talking about. It’s about all the things we haven’t been talking about. All the love that’s gone unexpressed or the offenses that have gone unaddressed for weeks. And it all comes out over me chewing guava too loud.

This tension comes out in words, but that’s not what it is, any more than Rene Magritte painted apples. Emotion is expressed in many ways, but it’s always much more than the sum of its parts. Sometimes it’s a complete contradiction. Who the fuck knows? We barely even hold our emotions inside our own body, they’re intrinsically connected to other people, to dead people, to cultures, to our collective imagination.

The idea that we can put “what we’re feeling” into words is actually farcical. Who are we, Picasso? Even that guy was an asshole, so whatever problem expressing yourself is supposed to solve, it obviously doesn’t work. Artists seem miserable.

I return to the point about children, because that’s how I see everything now. When do we actually grow up, and when does the child disappear? My mother-in-law does counseling and most problems she sees go back to childhood.

A friend was telling me why he doesn’t want to take the COVID vaccine and he started by talking about his childhood, stuck between his parents fighting. What do these things have to do with each other? On the surface, nothing. But on the emotional level, everything.

With babies we understand this—we understand that they’re probably just sleepy or hungry or gassy, or just need love—but for adults we somehow forget. We think emotions are for a reason and that they need a rational solution, but this is a contradiction in terms.