I read a post on the ‘gram about “Emodiversity.” I think the full article was written by David Brooks for The Atlantic. I don’t have a subscription and so I am floating on the blurb under the graphics, perhaps an irresponsible handling of the subject matter. Nonetheless, the notion intrigued me and I wanted to put a pin in it for my own self assessment and reflection. 

The idea that we can experience more than one emotion at once and we can label them with nuance and specificity is what I gathered the term “Emodiversity” means. There is something settled and wise about people who can filter through complex emotions and connect language to the diverse landscape present in the human experience. That is the sort of competence I prize in my own life and my own family. In the same caption it was said that this brand of emotional literacy in its particularity leads to healthier handling of emotions, more self regulation, ingestion of fewer substances that obscure or distort emotions, etc. There seems to be a powerful analgesic in the act of naming what is being felt instead of trying to smother it. 

As I was glorifying this concept of just affixing a label to more than one thing felt at any given time, I began to see that I am having an opposite experience in grief. I feel lost in a labyrinth or a house of mirrors, too many emotions to process. 

I have had my hand on the pulse of my emotions since my mom died in July. In fact, I feel hyper alert. The adage that there is no wrong way to grieve except by avoiding it has made me an emotional hypochondriac. I fling myself into a frenzy, intent on getting to the bottom of it all. I turn the interrogator’s light on and grill myself through every aspect of those more shapeless amorphous emotions.

Grief is not a singular emotion, it is a log jam. In my persistence to boil each down to its scientific name or define the parameters, I am missing the forest for the trees. I am looking at the intricacy of the tree bark with a high powered microscope and missing the whole picture. There are certainly days that naming the emotion has been a good use of my time, while other days, I get so tangled in defining and categorizing that I don’t actually attend to what my body and mind are in need of. The labor needed for knowing what it is I am feeling is tedious and I can’t get to the knowing in enough time to evaluate my human need.

Do I sit? Lay down? Exercise? Walk? Read? Stare into the middle distance? Engage with human beings? Eat? Hydrate? Start a project? Shower? Organize? Nap?

I wonder how much of this tends to be indicative of mother-loss. Before her death, before her accident, my mother was bolstering me in the deep psychic pain of navigating my three year old through Leukemia. She was helping me steer through the anguish and trauma of that journey. She was both intimate to the situation while also being ahead and outside enough to grant perspective I couldn’t obtain. In the shadow of losing her, I feel like I am left to my own emotionally saturated mind without her wisdom and broader experiential understanding.

I remember, specifically, the last time Addy was admitted to the hospital. Her intentionally suppressed immune system was unable to get on top of an infection sending her into a neutropenic fever. I handled the slow daily grind of medication and the customary amount of hyper-vigilance associated with parenting a child through cancer, but something about the hospital threw the whole mess over the cliff. Kids with cancer died of secondary infections. It was always existential to be admitted into the hospital. It was a crises of body, mind, and soul. Contemplating my daughter dying was traumatic.

Addy had fallen asleep in a tangle of tubes and wires and sheets. Hospitals have too many sounds and lights and people to find rest. It was quite late when I was trying to get comfortable on the bench converted into a stiff bed. Instead of sleeping, I was crying on the phone to my mom about how I’d give back every single lesson I’d learned on the back of Addy’s pain and suffering. I cannot even tell you what my mom said specifically that night, it was more like an infant being calmed by the cooing cadence of her mother. It was primal nurturing. She spoke in ways that renewed my capacity and my resolve to get up and keep facing this lamentable task. She could name and validate the emotions looking at it all from a distance.

When I feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emotions to contemplate without her, I go numb in self preservation. It seems to be a vicious cycle of emotional overload to numbness to frenzied overwhelm. Maybe this is what the lessons of the year will bring (along with actually reading the article that got me thinking) — to honestly answer these questions with more efficiency and efficacy: What are you feeling? What do you need? 

*I’d like to add that I value the concept of Emodiversity and believe that it has benefit. I am not dismissing it because of my circumstances. I believe that as the potency of grief wanes it will become a wonderful tool personally, interpersonally, and professionally.