“I feel like this is heading in the wrong direction.”
“I feel like this is absolutely brilliant.”
Do you really feel that? Or are you just thinking you feel it?
When I moved to San Francisco nearly 25 years ago, I discovered something relatively unknown to me then: feeling. Emotions. “Express yourself,” they said. I was young, drawn to the hippies in the Lower Haight. I learned to open up and dove deep into that “touchy feely” language. I’ve been talking about feelings ever since. Or so I thought all these years.
Much time has passed and I’m no longer a West Coast softy. But I still enjoy talking about feelings. Recently though, I noticed something. While I talk about feelings, I’m not actually expressing what and how I feel — I’m expressing what I think.
Why? When you feel something, you only need a simple, short sentence: “I feel angry.” That’s it. If anything follows “I feel xyz (the emotion)” — like “I feel that you’re betraying me” — then you’re still stuck in your head. The other way around: if someone says “I don’t feel good because you’re betraying me,” you should listen carefully and ask what’s really behind that.
Perhaps we should say more clearly what we think and what we feel. I’m going to pay closer attention and convert some of my “I feel” statements to “I think” and keep the feeling sentences simply short. “I’m happy” — FULL STOP. You don’t need to say more.
Listen to yourself: Are you really conveying just a feeling, or rather a thought that you’re linguistically packaging as a feeling to soften the impact (because it’s a feeling, after all)? Maybe you’re stuck deeper in your head than you thought.
This post started in German on reinergaertner.de — yes, 1997, I’ve been doing this a while. The translation was AI-assisted. Any remaining awkwardness is authentically bilingual.