I now have over 100 submissions for the National Parks of Emotions project, after running three workshops. I’ve been spending time making charts to see what emotions I have, where the patterns are, and what would be interesting to get more of. It’s a small sample of course, but it starts to paint a picture of how people have been feeling during the pandemic. It’s been fun to play around with word clouds, which map the size of the word based on the frequency it occurs:
You can see from the word cloud some of the dominant emotions that are swirling around— loneliness, gratitude, anxiety, uncertainty, all different kinds of sadness.
You might also wonder how I’m defining an emotion for the project. I’ll go more into depth in a future post about what I’m reading and thinking about regarding theories and definitions of emotions and what they are. I’ve been learning a ton and it’s really fascinating.
Some people might feel that concepts like “betrayal”, “untetheredness”, or “creativity” are not emotions, but I’m taking a very broad view at this point. If it’s an emotion concept or feeling that someone in a culture somewhere (even if it’s not an English emotion word) could communicate and someone else would know what they’re talking about, then that’s fine for now. It could be a emotion word that’s consists of a mix of other emotions, that’s fine too (for example, angst is a combination of anxiety and dread). As long as you can say, “Because of the pandemic, I feel _____”, then for the purposes of this project it’s a national park of emotion that you can visit and describe, and I want to hear about it.
I’ve realized though, that while I love hearing about all of the varieties of emotions, that for the next round of submissions, I’m going to ask people to start filling in the parks more. I still want to give people the freedom to choose an emotion, but I need multiple submissions for each park so there’s more material in each. Comparing and contrasting what your uncertainty or frustration looks like compared to mine is where it starts to get particularly interesting artistically. I’ll share an example of that in a coming post.
Meanwhile, I would love your help and feedback about the following two questions:
Which National Parks of Emotion would you like to see that I don’t have yet?
Which ones should I gather more stories about, that feel crucial to include as part of our collective emotional pandemic experience?