If Picasso and Da Vinci wrote instead of painted

Human emotions are best understood when set in action. Describing in words limits these emotions. But even if description limits the emotion, sometimes we need these descriptions to make people understand how we are feeling inside.

I remember a writing assignment for my Filipino class in college. My prof gave each one of us a single topic for our descriptive essays. Our topics varied from well-known persons, places, things, and events. The Who, Where, What, and When.

Challenging me more than anyone else, my prof decided to give me none of these tangibles.

I had to describe an emotion. I had to describe "awa".

In English, "awa" would be roughly translated to "pity" but if I wrote my essay in English, I wouldn't have grasped the emotion "awa". My essay would have been totally different as I feel "pity" as slightly different from "awa".

How do I write about an emotion? I have an abstract way of understanding how. I feel it then I write it. But I didn't know that when I was 17. In other words, my essay for that particular assignment sucked. Okay, it didn't suck as in below-passing-grade-suck but it was just okay.

If she gave the same assignment to me now, I would have done it much better. Somehow, I feel that I am better equipped in understanding a human emotion, cradling it in my arms as if tangible, and writing it down into words.

Maybe what I actually understand better now is what the emotion does to me. When contained, it feels like a bubble ready to burst inside. It could be triggered by an outside force but emotions usually arise even before we consciously think about it. The emotion jerks us but only inside. Sometimes it manifests itself physically and we could only hope to guard it and to tone it down just a little bit for self-preservation.

For instance, how many of us have experienced that fast beating of the heart that just occurs when we see images of particular persons? We sometimes hope that fast beating won't be as loud to others as it is to ourselves. We try to keep this information to ourselves because we don't want to be vulnerable to others.

I am not the type who blushes. I don't actually. It's just like that with my skin color. But a lot of other people do and their ability to blush betrays them no matter how much they try to keep their emotions in. But even if I'm lucky that blushing isn't part of my composition as a person, my face is so transparent that no matter how much my skin tone protects my emotions, my expressions just give them all away. In particular, my eyes give them all way.

But I've come to a point that I don't need to hide any emotions. I just want to share them and show them. I've shown real emotions to most of you.

Although I probably wrote in abstract and in codes again, this post has so much meaning for me. Bottom line is I'm one of the most emotional persons I've ever known. And I hope one day that I'd be able to write all these human emotions down in their full intensities and colors.