What you are Feeling

Two hundred and seventy-three feelings, and what each one is for.

Most of us talk about our emotions the way we talk about the weather. It came over me. It hit me out of nowhere. It passed. Weather has no cause worth finding and no logic worth working with, which leaves only one thing to do with a difficult feeling: endure it. A great many people endure things for years that would have yielded in months to a different question.

This book starts somewhere else. Every emotion is machinery, and machinery has a job. Fear prepares a body to run. Shame prepares it to be smaller. Grief, strangely and painfully, prepares it to search, which is why the bereaved scan crowds and cannot delete the number, and why so many of them privately believe they are losing their mind. They are not. Once you know what a feeling is doing, the question changes from how do I make this stop, which is almost never answerable, to what is this for, which frequently is.

Part One explains how emotions actually work: why they were set the way they were, why what you feel on the surface is so often not what is running underneath, and why some people can look inward and find nothing at all.

Part Two is an A to Z of every named state, from Abandonment Panic to Wretchedness. Each entry covers what the feeling is, what it is for, what it does to your body, what helps, what makes it worse, and, most usefully, what it gets mistaken for.

That last part is the heart of it. Shame and guilt behave completely differently and almost everyone uses the words interchangeably. Envy and jealousy are not the same feeling. Burnout is not depression. Acceptance is not resignation. An enormous amount of stuck effort comes from working patiently on the wrong state.

This is not a diagnosis, a programme, or a course of treatment, and it says so plainly. It is a reference: for the feeling you cannot name, the reaction that seems out of proportion, and the words you have needed and never had.