I love the beach. It’s the place that the lizard that lives in my brain is the happiest. I think we all have a little animal in our head, and sometimes that animal gets to its happy place and gets to take over completely, and for me that means getting to a hot beach makes me very, very happy.
What does happy at the beach look like for me? What that means is I lie still in the shade and let the heat of the sand soak into my back.
Someone else might look at me and say “he looks bored.” But I know, I’m actually happy. Lizards are happy on a hot rock. Someone else might not like the beach. They might need to be around trees (a bird brain?). Or in a cave (a bat brain?). Or playing with clay. Or dancing. Or something else that I don’t even know about. And that person’s happiness is theirs, and mine is mine, but both of us have what we would call “happy.”
But there is no thing that is “happy” for everyone. We don’t all have the same animals in our heads. And we can’t act as if someone “doesn’t have emotions” just because they find them—or express them—in a way that is different than the way we would.
Emotions are the sea we soak in. Each of us goes into the water and each of us needs to make sure we know where dry land is, and each of us feels the wave rise and fall. But none of us can say how it feels for anyone else. None of us can demand that others feel the same waves. None of us can control when or how a wave might overwhelm us and make us struggle for air.
The hard part of the question about writing and emotion is that it misses the point. It’s not emotion you’re trying to write about, it’s the world around you triggering the emotion. The lizard in my head would have to explain the hot sand, the cooling shade, the soothing ocean sounds to convey its peace and contentment. Calling the experience “happy” is a shortcut. Don’t take the shortcut. When you read something by someone who you don’t think of a having strong emotions—maybe yourself!—don’t look for emotions, look for how the world is presented.
Exercise: What animal lives in your head? Write a scene about that animal telling another animal about it’s BEST moment. How does a happy elephant talk to a mouse? What does the sad dog tell the cat? How do you explain what the world is to you to someone else?