The Colors of Emotion

When I was little, every ounce of my being was devoted to not dying and avoiding injury. Emotion was grey. A long rainbow of grey. Fear is grey. Happiness is cool grey 2 (CG), because it’s lighter, but there’s always a risk that my smile wasn’t the right smile, my thank you wasn’t the right thank you, or they just might want to do something else and nothing I could say or do had any impact on what they’d do. I was kind of a CG1 color, just so barely there that people might forget I was around.

Once when I’d first gotten to San Francisco, my mother’s new boyfriend brought me a kitten. I love kittens. I wrapped it up in my arms and cherished it and curled up on the couch and slept with it. In that moment I hadn’t felt alone. I might have even, just between me and the kitten, made it out of the greys. I was six. I wasn’t very verbal yet. That kitten was a promise for good things I couldn’t verbalized.

It was gone when I woke.

They’d traded it for a dog, thrown the kitten on the freeway, and told me so. I didn’t want the dog. Whatever not grey color had been, now the world was a CG50, dark as the anger I’d never been allowed to feel. They kept saying, this boyfriend of my mom’s and another guy, didn’t I want the dog?

No. I didn’t want the dog. I wanted my kitty back more than I had the ability to verbalize in that moment. I wanted that kitty back so badly that nearly fifty years later, it still hurts.

When my daughters were born, each of them, I learned the color for determined. Determined is a deep burnished golden color and it wraps around your bones like you’re the daddy now and you can stop trains with your bare hands, if you need to. Determined is good.

A couple years after that, I was at a literary convention and I won an auction for a painting. The artist honestly should have gotten a lot more than I was able to pay. Her work is utterly amazing and that piece in particular was the most beautiful painting I had ever seen. It was a portrait of a blond vampire, in blue and silver historical clothing. It wasn’t complicated or breathtakingly unique, but the man on that paper looked like my inner protector, the man from the orchard, and when I won, a brand new color big banged into existence in my world. It was golden-yellow-pale-blue like the first sunrise one might see at a beach, after only knowing the darkness of a dangerous forest.

I slept with that painting for a week, way back in the day when hightops were the height of fashion and Yahoo wasn’t even a thing yet. I have that painting still. It really needs a new frame. I’ve carried it with me to five states. Once I lived in a highrise apartment building that seemed prone to fire alarms. Every time I had to go down the stairs and into the thick Seattle fog (also known as rain), I carried it down with me, along with my violin (which I can’t play... there’s no such thing as no talent, but on violin, I might as well be casting random curses around to those that get to hear me). One of my first publications was a story about that character. Happiness is a beautiful, complex color.

Safety isn’t a bright color like happiness, or the emotional sponge grey that fear is. I found safety well after my kids had all grown up. I’d been in a house share with the same people for a long time and I’ve never been good setting boundaries, ever. It comes back to that grey that’s running through my veins too often, that if I tell someone to back the f*ck up, it’s just going to get me beat down, which isn’t fair to the people I have relationships with and it isn’t a good plan for keeping relationships, but changing takes time and frustration is more a texture like giant hook and loop tape on the inside of one’s socks than it is a color. Still, safety is a very fine color, like the best of plaid, a tartan that gives you name and space, lines within which you can stand and reasonably expect no harm to come to you. I love the feeling of safe.

With such a close relationship with depression, I had thought that sad would be grey too, but it’s not. Sad is a beautiful crystal cave of blues, because a lost friendship, the death of a dear coworker, whatever loss there is that leads to sad, it means there was something beautiful and wonderful that we had, but don’t anymore. Those memories solidify to sharp edged crystal, so lovely to carry in one’s heart, but so very painful as well, until time has softened away the sharpness.

Most recently I learned the color of anger. Not the feeling of being cornered and needing to lash out like a CG35, but a more mystifying and delightful anger. It’s hot, glowing red like the coal burning in a steam engine or the charcoal ready to cook the hamburgers. It’s an active color, fortifying boundaries, lighting up the self so you can know just where you stand. Anger is lightening embodied in a black diamond edge. It burns the grey right on up, filtering out of of my blood in a healthy, natural process.

No color is supposed to be the only color. The colors of our emotions move across our lives like a living painting, blending, smearing, blotting, and accumulating into textures, building up into impasto around the moments that deeply matter. In this moment, right before I share this with you, my emotion is hope and love, which for me are wonderful cotton candy pink and lavender, watercolor-y and ephemeral, but surrounded by the Christmas colored tartan of safe and watched over by the black electric diamond anger. Today is a beautiful day to be still alive.