Emotions in a nutshell

I originally published this on Medium a few years ago. I wrote it after my uncle’s funeral in 2017. He had suddenly passed away with no previously indicated health problems. I had only met him two or three times in my life, the fourth was for the last look.

I realized at my uncle’s funeral that I had been out of touch with a deeply emotional side of me. I stopped speaking Telugu effectively by the time I was 8 or 9, which doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but whatever happened afterwards, it made sure that those emotions I learned early on, that I associated with words my parents, friends and sister taught me would forever be encased within a shell and forgotten about, cut off from the rest of my system of thought.

Emotions often came for me erratically, overwhelming at times, while other times I felt nothing at all during times when I know I should have felt something more. We learn words and their meaning through association, context, the emotions that others express when they hear those words. Disgust for when we hear about shit. Delight when we hear about sweets. We cross over and violate all sorts of boundaries of vocabulary when we talk about the things we like — our lovers are sweet, that catch was sweet. Once we learn what good is, we start to categorize things — into good and bad.

So it makes sense to me that for a long time, I had a disorganized view of morality. I believed in right and wrong, but it was a childish part of me that believed those things. I grew older and never developed on those ideas, just clinged to them until they were rotten through and collapsed under their own contradictions. In the meantime I had learned how to use English words, some of them I allowed to pipe back into my heart, with a bit of a delay, and its something I’m learning to do more and more every day, but it feels strange. English is the language of business, more a weapon for me to slice the world into the shape I want than a channel for my feelings. I feel like others can tell when I’m being robotic, though there is definitely a feeling deep down I’m too scared to express in English.

It feels so much safer in Telugu, because the only thing I know is childhood innocence in that language. English words like ‘fear’ and ‘threat’ are tainted with visions of guns, punches, public humiliation, disrepute. Telugu words like ‘bhaiyyam’ and ‘jagratta’ are devoid of that power — but they invoke a much deeper, visceral feeling. I realize, this is how it must feel for other people — the deep child part of you that learns a particular thing, its why we all are nostalgic for the past. The past gave us these feelings — a word, and with it a blanket and warm milk, but we forgot about the blanket and the warm milk and we only remember the feeling. I feel cheated now to know that my emotional being is so stunted in such a way — that all the words I’ve memorized and known are just flimsy displays, like shellaced food in front of a restaurant — no bite, no taste, and if you look too closely something seems off putting about it.

If that’s all words are — things that conjure up images in your head, and those specific phonemes in that particular sequence are what unlocks the vault to childhood experiences and to different meanings, isn’t it terrifying to communicate with someone else who has a different context? How could they possibly know what you mean by ‘hurt’?