how does one write their emotions?

After years of daily journaling, I’ve realized something about myself. I believe that I cannot fully convey my current feelings simply by writing. After all, the English language consists of at least a hundred thousand words to select from; selecting the precise words to use to express how I feel now is truly unreasonable. This lack of instantaneous confidence I get from writing isn’t necessarily from inexperience with writing, but rather, the complexity of emotions a human processes can’t be entirely written out and properly conveyed. Despite having read hundreds of books over the years, it seems that I still struggle to find the right words to convey a specific feeling.

For example, when journaling about my feelings, I cannot just state that “I am happy” when this line doesn’t properly describe the exact feeling of happiness I have felt. In regard to this, there are words I could use to describe the different varieties of happiness. I could say that I was feeling “excited” when I received my very first camera, yet the word “grateful” could work as well. The subcategories of different emotions to describe that certain feelings are limitless, further increasing the difficulty of selecting the correct word. To resolve this issue, I’ve tried using both words in my writing. Even so, saying that “I was so excited and grateful to receive my very first camera” still doesn’t encapsulate the emotions I felt that day. It excluded the fact that I was longing for a camera for quite some time, the anticipation towards the moments that I could capture within the lens, and the other emotions I felt at that very second. This inability to properly convey the feelings I’ve felt couldn’t possibly be from my weak vocabulary, nor could it be from the laziness of trying to write every single feeling I’ve felt at that time (because if I did that, I would still miss several crucial details of that moment). During this realization, I found out a crucial weakness I had. My inability to properly write out my thoughts.

When looking back at my old diaries, incorporated with smudges from my fountain pen and littered scribbles to cross out my misspelled words, the writings of the summary of that day flooded the page. Despite the lengthy recap my past self provided, a part of me realized that I never truly wrote the summary of that moment, but rather, a glimpse of what it was. In the past, I would write out how my day went, any monumental moments I desperately needed to remember, and perhaps a small inclusion of the emotion I felt at the time. Even so, I longed for the true remembrance of the past. There was a time when I had fought with my childhood friend, which became a huge ordeal at that moment of my life, yet looking back at my words, it looked as if that event didn’t play that big of a role in the functionality of my day-to-day life. The sentence “we fought and stopped being friends, and I’ve never felt this sort of feeling in my life before” does a decent job of recapping the incident, but when it comes to the complexity of emotions I felt at that time, it’s like it was just another eventful day. Although it was years ago, I can still faintly recall this concoction of sadness and anger that built inside of me that day. Even with this recollection, I am unable to fully remember the exact emotion. This writing weakness had led to this feeling of artificial reminiscence. Due to the illusory sentiment towards that specific memory, it became difficult to determine whether what was written was a replica of the event. So how did I combat this weakness? To put it simply, rather than directly stating the emotion I felt or putting a vague description, I decided to try a different approach to my journal entries.

Instead of writing that “I was so excited and grateful to receive my very first camera”, which sounds overly bland and generic, I used that specific moment and created a story from that event. I would say that “after several years of blowing out candles and desperately wishing for a camera to suddenly appear on my bedside table, I was blessed with my dream camera on my 18th birthday. Potential ideas for photography quickly consumed my thoughts and coincided with the endless possibilities of film concepts.” After elaborating on what led to the event and what that event would lead to, the simple journal entry becomes an opportunity for storytelling. This was what I was lacking. The ability to not only talk about the emotions of the present, but also include the emotions of the past and future to support the story. Using this strategy, my seemingly short daily entries became an opportunity for me to sharpen both my writing skills and my memory recollection. The more I wrote, the more detailed the moment became. The more I wrote, the more nostalgia entered my system. The more I wrote, the more I realized that writing about my emotions was not entirely impossible; I had just been approaching the situation in a non-creative way.

Besides helping my writing gain more fluidity and detail, it also helped me greatly in my English classes. After being a victim of constantly having my writings be “straight to the point”, my essays end up having more depth to them. Instead of just analyzing the actions of a character and seeing how they contribute to the main plot of the story, I try to analyze the emotions of the character and see how they affect their actions for all the tenses. Through this method, I’ve been able to resonate more with the characters of the stories. Rather than just seeing them as characters in a book, I see them for who they truly are.

Even though my writing at the moment is nowhere near perfect, the improvement from being completely unable to describe my emotions to painting a picture of my feelings by only using words is undoubtedly something that helped me become a finer writer.