River: Modified rapture and other qualified moods
This afternoon it occurred to me to wonder why I so often qualify my moods -- both here on DW, and offline if anyone asks me. I'll say "mostly okay", or "ok?", or occasionally even "unknown" -- I think I used that last week, actually. (*goes to check* No, it was "indeterminate", 8 days ago.) (I don't appear to have actually used "modified rapture" (the quote is from Nanki-Poo in The Mikado) as a blog mood, though I did use it as a title once.) Apparently bears try to be precise, even when they don't need to. (They also use nested parentheses from time to time, because LISP.)
I've been doing this for a long time.
Partly, it's because I seem to have a lot of trouble figuring out what my mood is at any given time, especially if it isn't anxious, angry, or depressed. "Okay" is sort of my "none of the above" category. And partly it's because I really don't know what emotions like love and joy are "supposed to" feel like, or in other words what the words mean to other people.
Maybe another way to say it is that I tend to think that I ought to understand something in order to write about it. But that's not entirely true. I write love songs, memorials, and things like QV and sometimes while I'm writing it seems that I'm just stringing words and images together in the only way that makes sense. And when I stumble across a line that makes me choke up with some emotion, I know that it's a good line but I can't necessarily identify the emotion it's evoking. I can write a blog post, and stick a mood label on it that seems like the right one for the content, without knowing what it means or what I actually did.
Does impostor syndrome apply to this use case? Probably.
NaBloPoMo stats: 10844 words in 18 posts this month (average 602/post) 344 words in 1 post today
[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has
comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]