Butterfly feet

Warm Fuzzies 

In first grade, our class took a field trip to the local health center to learn about feelings. They called them “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies.” The other kids seemed to know exactly what the teacher meant. They talked about love, jealousy, fear, anger. They had words for everything.

I didn’t.

It was like going to a perfume convention and hearing experts explain flowers, base notes, and scent profiles. All I ever could get was that one smells good, and this one smells bad. I couldn’t explain why, or name the individual emotions that made up a good mood or a bad one. Just like I couldn’t tell you if your perfume contained notes of gardenia or hydrangea.

In my early life, the adults had placed me in “a special class,” which the adults nicely explained was because I was moving at my own pace. I figured that the emotions everyone talks about would happen to me soon. Whatever they were, I didn’t have them.

I just had moods: good or bad. Moods were things that happened to me, like weather rolling through town. I could tell when something smelled good or bad, but I couldn’t separate the notes. Other people talked about sadness, anger, jealousy. To me it was always a mixture with too many signals tangled together to pull apart. Mood felt external, like an alien force zapping me from the outside rather than something from my own head.

I later learned that psychologists have a word for this difficulty identifying emotions: alexithymia. But at the time it just felt like everyone else had a language I had never been taught.

Butterfly Feet

I don’t think in words. I cannot visualize pictures in my mind, or replay how a song sounds. When I try to imagine with my mind’s eye or ear, it feels like it is something in my periphery. It is there, but just out of sight. When I try to visualize anything, my mind stubbornly goes blank. Feelings are just another one of those sensations that I cannot visualize.

It was isolating. I felt left out of the human experience of my peers and trapped in my own. I couldn’t explain my moods. I decided they were invalid. Hormones. Evolutionary leftovers, as useful as your appendix. Ignore them when I could, weather the storm and wait for them to pass when I couldn’t.

Did you know that butterflies don’t smell, at least not with their noses. They taste with their feet, which makes sense when you walk on flowers and that’s your food. People sniff, butterflies strut. Putting perfume in the air would be lost on a butterfly, even though it knows all the flowers.

Music and movies became my butterfly feet. I discovered a language for my emotions through the age of cassettes. I would listen to the same album or watch the same movie over and over again. I have watched Kiki’s Delivery Service, in the background, easily over a hundred times!

These things give voice to what I cannot describe. The emotion I am feeling is Kiki’s Delivery Service. I don’t watch it again to give me emotions, but to reflect the emotions I am having at the moment. Songs and movies became mirrors where I could finally recognize myself. But Kiki isn’t one emotion; it’s all of them happening at once. I gravitate towards dense and contradictory media, usually with dreamlike logic. Kiki is experiencing all the conflicting emotions of someone leaving home and discovering herself. The movie is linear in presentation, but folds back on itself in impressions. Knowing the movie so well, once it starts, I have access to all of it at once. All the feelings, the whole journey, all the connections, the world beyond the main story that is never on screen, only hinted at. It is a dense bundle of too much emotional information to be easily named. I swim in that feeling, feeling seen, feeling recognizable.

My emotions are Kiki, Björk’s Hyper-Ballad, that episode of Star Trek Next Generation where Beverly Crusher finds herself trapped alone and knows that the universe is wrong, not her. I was starting to recognize the shapes of my own emotions.

Thought Scaffolds in Space

I spend a lot of time thinking about how I think, because once I have thought it, I have to figure out how to say it. I have to map it to a language. I don’t have the language to explain my emotions directly, so I give you metaphors; movie references, song quotes, stories about butterfly feet.

I don’t think in words, and I don’t think in pictures. My thoughts arrive as something closer to scaffolding; complex, three-dimensional structures that I can feel assembling themselves below the surface of my attention. Ideas are being recalled, connections forming, concepts drifting in and out of reach. When enough has connected, Pop! A complete structure surfaces into conscious attention. It is like a scaffolding cobbled together from weighted balls, springs, and wires. It is jiggling, malleable, alive.

I work with it consciously and play intuitively at the same time, adding, removing, and reshaping. Sometimes it holds and grows. Sometimes it dissolves, and I lose the thread. It isn’t linear. It isn’t verbal. It simply arrives, whole. To explain it, I have to tear it apart into words, which is its own problem. Dissecting is not the same as understanding.

But the scaffolding doesn’t float in neutral space. It lives somewhere, and the shape of that space matters. When I am calm, my thought space is like a flat table. My thoughts sit on the surface where they are stable. I can examine them, walk around to see different angles. It is safe to twist and adjust them, move pieces around.

The Warp Field

My emotions are not states. They are forces that warp the space where my thoughts live.

My emotions are not states. They are forces that warp the space where my thoughts live. When excited, my space feels flat and broad, plenty of room to spread out and play. Constricting emotions warp the table into more of a hammock. The model is unsupported and sags. Everything pulls toward the center. Some connections twist or break off. You cannot see it all at once anymore. You have to wrestle with the hammock and the idea. It is cramped with no room to work and more accidents.

The shape of thought space shapes my thoughts. What I can think, connect, or explore has shifted completely. I don’t recognize my emotion directly; I recognize their reshaping of my thought space.

When my mood is Crusher-Trapped-In-A-Shrinking-Universe, I feel cut off from connections. Ideas feel stretched, far out of reach. The space becomes smaller, confined. I catch myself getting caught in feedback loops. My thinking is confined. I keep running into the same wall. This means things are not good, so my thinking gets even more confined, and so on.

The opposite is true. When I am feeling Kiki’s Delivery Service, my thoughts are expansive. My big Kiki table has plenty of room for connections, options upon options. Things don’t just connect once or twice; thick bundles of meaning create wide bridges between ideas; each leap opening up fast-expanding horizons. Instead of panic, I get feedback loops that lead to being overly optimistic.

Reading the Weather

The feedback loops were bad. Spiraling wasn’t a metaphor; it seemed to be what I was wired for. What makes my mind work is its ability to quickly follow paths and recognize patterns. But this is also its failure mode. Just a little stimulus and we’re off to the races. Brainstorming or doom spiralling, it’s all the same feedback. It’s my emotional forces warping my thinking, me feeling my thinking change, and taking that as further evidence of safety or danger. I would spiral into one mood and out to another; sometimes over days, sometimes minutes. It was exhausting. It was making me sick. I was afraid.

In bad moments, my mood was more in control of my life than I was. There would be days of amazing productivity and being a delight for all my friends. I could be the life of the party, the savior of projects. Other days, I was worthless. I had nothing in me and nothing to bring. Good or bad, my feelings would be just too much. They would spiral to levels that just shut me down like a blown fuse. I could feel the crashes coming. I could spot myself spiralling and ask why? Why are my thoughts being shut down? Is this reaction appropriate? I had learned to brace for impact, but I started to ask why was I crashing in the first place?

One time, I was driving through a mountain pass, and my brakes went out. I had a VERY strong, bad emotional reaction to that, but I was calm. My thought field became very constrained, focused. I had one goal and a few reasonable paths to pursue. In that moment, the emotional forces shaping my thoughts were really helpful. But a lot of the time, I find that they are just old patterns being replayed for no good reason. I catch my thinking being shaped, and I recognize the emotional state and ask is this appropriate to the situation? Is this helpful? Like a mute (or at least a muffle) button, the feedback lessens and my thinking drifts back to baseline.

For the first time, moods were not something happening to me, but coming from me; forces to be examined, not endured. I noticed that I could physically feel my feelings. I could feel my stomach in knots and feel the constraining force in my head along with the tension headache. I would feel jittery and flush from anger or excitement; a leftover fight-or-flight response kicking in with any signs of excitement.

Feeling my emotions’ physical effects and recognizing them felt humanizing. It was the first common touch point that sounded similar to other people’s descriptions. People’s descriptions make it sound like one normally has one emotion that rolls linearly to the next. You are scared, which makes you anxious, which might turn into anger. In my scaffolding, everything is happening all at once. I can be Björk’s Hyper-Ballad happy/sad at the same time.

I suspect that most people have the same experience. I think everyone feels multiple and even conflicting emotions mixed together, but the language masks that truth. We talk about emotions one at a time, even though the experience is usually messier. Emotions are super-fast, less developed thoughts that our brains and bodies put together in our unconscious. This ability to make quick guesses or to have intuitions without having to spend conscious energy is great. For most people, they seem to be able to pull easy-to-use signals from their guts and go with them.

Lucid Feeling

For me, emotions are like dreaming. Dreams feel like movies you watch; you can be in them, but you can feel disconnected from them. If you know that you are experiencing a dream, you can shape it. Lucid dreaming is just a conversation between the parts of your brain. My lucid emotions let me stop being afraid of emotional nightmares and see them as just parts of my thinking process.

I do enjoy my emotions. I like that some days I feel Kiki and other days Flash Gordon. I still feel like that kid at the health center learning how to talk about feelings. I still have a hard time explaining my thoughts and feelings to people, but I feel a lot less isolated. I feel less isolated from myself. I know that I have emotions, that I’m a real boy, not just a simulation. I still have to look for them and interrogate my thinking to recognize their shapes, but they don’t feel like alien intruders anymore. They don’t swing my reality back and forth. Emotions don’t happen to me anymore; they happen with me. I will always have to examine my emotions and my thinking, but I no longer have to question whether they are real. I never did learn how to see my emotions directly. I learned how to walk on my butterfly feet.