Several people have asked me why I was just doing negative, or sad, or dark emotions. In trying to answer them, I kept struggling for the proper word for these kinds of emotions because I did not resonate with negative, sad, or dark. What they are is uncomfortable, I realized.

These uncomfortable emotions are more interesting to me than comfortable ones. We don’t have to work to recognize, understand, and navigate our comfortable emotions, like joy for example. In this series, I wanted to examine the color and movement—frequency pattern—of my own experience of these emotions.

Using just vertical lines and color to express complicated emotions was, by the end, very limiting, although at first it was quite liberating.

Generally, as I approached these interior states, I recognized a difference between ones that are more inward, like guilt and self-loathing, and ones that have an outward aspect, like loss and rage. I used shorter lines for the frequencies that are more inward and longer lines for the ones with some outward aspect.

Interior Frequencies № 5: Depression Not having suffered from depression, I worked with my younger daughter to understand how to express it. The ochre spurt just left of center represents a pang of self-loathing, and the one bright yellow spot to the right signifies a brief moment of joy. The very short frequency lines speak to a sense of non-existence.

Interior Frequencies № 4: Invisible My sense of being invisible is that I am there but I feel that people are not seeing me—not seeing the person that I am. Maybe I am just feeling like I don’t belong so I shrink into the background and invite being ignored. Or maybe they are just relating to me as someone I am not and never have been. The frequency lines are short here because feeling invisible is very private and makes me feel small.

Interior Frequencies № 11: Guilt Guilt feels green to me. It is an interior state that I try to evade and rationalize. I may be able to intellectualize my way around it for a period of time, but it always comes back, just eating away at me. Short lines represent this very inward and private state.

Interior Frequencies № 10: Hopeless This one speaks for itself.

Interior Frequencies № 7: Conflicted In my limited experience of feeling conflicted, I’ve found myself going back and forth between two things for which I have equal intensity of feeling. I chose these colors because they feel emotionally pensive to me.

Interior Frequencies № 3: Self-loathing I set out to select the worst color palette that I could mange. I wanted it to be pukey, like vomit, to represent an intense feeling of disgust. I actually found it difficult to create an ugly palette. The frequency iines are relatively short but unrelenting, just like self-loathing.

Interior Frequencies № 8: Shame The colors felt like shame feels. Shame is deeper than humiliation and more than just feeling ashamed. It is an insidious thing that is inflicted by others. It affected my sense of self-worth, of value, of feeling like I deserve to exist. Until it is recognized and understood, it grows and seeps into all other areas of life.

Interior Frequencies № 9: Dread It was difficult to feel the colors of dread, but I eventually chose these and I do find them dreadful. As for the frequency pattern, I experience dread as a feeling that pulsates, retreating into the background and then resurfacing, over and over.

Interior Frequencies № 2: Rage I did not achieve that of out-of-control, blinding kind of rage, but I think this feels more rage-y to me than mere anger. The colors are self-explanatory. The lines are long because rage has a big outward expression. The black in the middle represents my inner state at the time, which virtually does not exist.

Interior Frequencies № 1": Loss I found these colors easy to choose as they feel like loss as I have experienced it. The lines are long because of loss’s outward expression. At the height of it, I feel like I have lost part/s of myself, represented by the missing pieces. This sense continues but diminishes with time.

Interior Frequencies № 6: Humiliation This emotion has both a strong outward experience and inward experience for me. When I feel humiliated, I try to hide it and remain cool on the outside, but inside I feel like the red snake of it is burning me up.

Interior Frequencies № 12: Overwhelmed Not sure about the colors. At this point, with this being the last one, I was having trouble feeling the color of overwhelmed. I think several palettes would have worked. Perhaps even more contrasting colors. This state feels like it has an outward expression. For me, it comes on pretty suddenly; maybe it is simmering for some time without me being conscious of it, or it is the immediate onslaught of particular circumstances.