“I Can’t Find the Words.”
I’ve heard this a lot this past week. Colleagues and friends alike have drawn long faces, let out sighs, and shrugged heavy shoulders as though they were Atlas in great need of a break. If I had to guess, most of us are in great need of a break.
There’s an idea for this phenomenon — alexithymia is an inability to put names to one’s emotions and feelings. It’s recently begun to pop up in more places, but I can also imagine that a lot of people haven’t heard of it. Identifying one’s feelings seems a rather remedial task. “I am sad,” or “I feel angry.” Certainly, the “How are you Feeling Today?” charts aren’t so esoteric or ancient that a majority of people can’t name their feelings. At the same time, there must also be people who do genuinely struggle to name their emotions. Maybe it’s a disconnect in the hardware, or a more elaborate rewiring akin to synethesia, where one’s senses overlap such that smells have color and sights have fundamentally linked sounds. But I don’t think that’s what has happened to most of us.
Emotions have been a point of fascination for me for over a decade for now. Emotions have been inspiration for so much of my artwork, and given my depression my own emotional state has been a consistent source of perseveration. Abstract notions like “happy” or “satisfaction” have always been really difficult for me to sustain, and it’s always been a puzzle to me how it comes so easily to others (the answer, in large part is my chronic depression but that’s a different story).
In 2016, I got a bit of a break in the puzzling. Amidst my own anguish over how the president elect had run his campaign — a horrorshow of “facts don’t matter,” and misogyny — when the smoke cleared I felt an odd sense of community. For the first time in a long while, most people around me seemed pretty depressed.
I definitely feel that again; at work recently my colleagues gathered before classes to share a somber space and commiserate. “I don’t know what to say,” echoed a few times over amidst earnest flairs of melancholy and despair.
It makes sense. The scientist in me quickly seeks to vivisect the moment and examine the component parts. In truth, nothing is solely responsible for what’s happening; my peers are not all suddenly experiencing alexithymia, nor are they all so ill-spoken that they don’t have the vocabulary to form meaningful sentiments here. Instead, a confluence of factors leads to an emergent behavior presenting as the void.
“What’s there to be said,” says one component. In an age of overwhelming information, so many of our thoughts have already been blasted hundreds of times over. Our culture lauds individualism, and is not well-known for being flush with emotional vocabulary. We want our expression to feel unique and ours alone, but ultimately there are hundreds of millions of Americans experiencing the moment and there aren’t hundreds of millions of unique ways to express it. Especially for our difficult emotions, it can feel like repetition only adds to the pain. There’s almost a resistance to the commiseration, as if admitting one’s feelings to be like the rest only cements the harsh reality we want so desperately to deny. If we say it, then it’s true and we have to deal with it.
“It just all feels like too much,” says another component. Despite our efforts to project human emotions onto two-dimensional landscapes, I believe wholeheartedly that the truth of emotions lies in an almost infinite-dimensional world. Our emotions layer and twist in upon themselves like tectonic shifts in a Klein bottle. What do we say for our feelings when sadness, anger, frustration, despair, etc are all happening at once AND life has the audacity to yield us additional experiences? What do we say when amidst a week like this, we share a tender moment with a crush or receive a loving note in the mail? How can we authentically express any one emotion when internally we face a cacophony of feelings?
“I just can’t believe it,” says another component. In the face of crisis, there’s regularly a present shock response. This holds a pragmatic advantage; in a physiological emergency, shock is a suspended state driven by adrenaline that allows us to act against the odds and despite the ramifications. In the face of emotional trauma our shock response doesn’t often have a lot of action to take, at least not on our own. Some of that is cultured, and some seems truly innate. The results of this election add on top of a large pile of anxiety-inducing truths in our world as of late. Overwhelmed by anxiety, the human animal turns to comfort in many forms. For some that’s food, and for others it’s sex, drugs, sleep, escape, denial, etc. Once again, there’s an understandable resistance to embracing the moment. As long as we resist the embrace, we delay any actions we may have to take.
“I just don’t understand,” says another component. For the majority of us, the ego is a very strong internal driver for us to make sense of our world. The same engines that drive bigotry and demand that some of us are “more human” than others act in other ways to deny a painful empathic experience. There’s a root of fear here. I believe that even for those of us who aren’t so scientifically minded, understanding is a means to deescalate an inherent fear of the unknown or the other. There seems to also be a strong want for this to be more under our control. If we could understand, perhaps we could intervene where necessary and actually make change. On the contrary, we’ve seen countless times over the past three elections that friction like this does not abate with logic or understanding. Some (maybe even a large majority) of these votes were cast with a far more personal rationale. That rationale is highly contextual and cannot be understood in whole. At best, we can only view its component parts from the outside and guess as to how their composition works.
I’m certain there are other components clamoring away inside us right now. The noise can feel deafening and the result is understandably often muted.
What I can offer in the short term is that words are not our own means of expression. There are so many media to express ourselves, and the first step for any is an embrace that it does not need to be perfect. Scribble red all over a page, find a sad song and sing along, go buy a cheap plate at goodwill and break it in a back alley. Seek other ways to get some of these feelings out into reality, because right now they are the reality and denying that will only worsen the divide between the internal and external states.
It’s okay if you’ve nothing to say right now. It’s okay if you’ve no interest in doing anything right now.
Depression is an understandable and normal response to the events around us.
Try to remember you are alive and that your needs don’t go away.
Eating may be difficult. You will need the energy. Please find a way to feed your body.
Sleeping may be difficult. You will need the rest. Please remind yourself that the work, feelings, etc. will be there tomorrow and give yourself grace to find respite for a bit.
Doing may be difficult. You will need the dopamine. Please find something to do, however small, to fulfill yourself.
Loving may be difficult. You will need the care. Please find a way to ask for help and share space with others.
I hesitate to say I’m here as an “expert”. I have a lot of experience being depressed. I am here to share and hold space with you as you need it.
Woefully yours,
August
