August 9, 2022

The necessity of unpleasant emotions

I grew up thinking about emotions as either positive or negative. I could be happy or sad, angry or calm, pleasant or unpleasant. The goal, I learned, was to avoid the negative emotions and try to spend more time feeling the positive ones.

But, what I’ve come to realise is that what’s important isn’t the emotion, but the energy associated with it and the behaviour and action that energy provokes. The energy within the emotion, whether a pleasant or unpleasant one, can be the source of incredible things.

Take, for example, grief; specifically the sort of grief that accompanies the loss of a loved one. The emotions of despair, hopelessness, and alienation dominate our being for, perhaps, longer and with more intensity than we like when we lose someone. They are, quite specifically, unpleasant feelings.

But, despair, hopeless, and alienation are also high-energy emotions. And we have two choices when we lose a loved one. We can dwell on what we’ve lost (which is an important part the grieving process), but we can also be thankful for what we’ve still got. We have a choice about how we can use the intensity of what we’re feeling and it can drive us to what we do next.

Some of my favourite art has been produced by artists who say that it came from a place of high-energy emotion (and it’s often the unpleasant ones). I’ve done this myself – whether it’s from losing someone we love dearly, or the despair I feel that comes from thinking about the existential threat of climate change and our impact on the planet.

So, whilst emotions still exist on a positve (pleasant) and negative (unpleasant) axis, and the unpleasant ones are still ones I prefer to avoid most of the time, the energy level of those emotions tend to be what I try to focus on. I know that I can use those unique and intense human experiences to drive me to action; to approach the act of art-making with a high-energy curiosity and determination to develop answers (or, at the very least, perspectives) to the questions those intense feelings stir up.

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