The Feelings Wheel Spiral [ The Work ]

[ The Writer ] Megan Wildhood

Megan Wildhood is a writer who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at meganwildhood.com.

[ The Process ]

“I initially tried to format this in a circle after the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) "feelings wheel" that many people who work with kids, among others, have started using to help with the monumental task of being human - that is to say, feeling, naming, processing, and moving through (or not, as the case may be) feelings. But for me, the "wheel" didn't really make sense with my experience of feelings. I found that, as soon as I was able to name a feeling or put my finger on it, more would emerge for me in that specific feeling. I wouldn't be moving around a wheel so much as having different feelings within the original one I named. Trying to explain that in words, as much of a word-lover as I am as a writer, was, as you can probably see, confusing on its own and wasn't quite capturing the sentiment. When I realized that what I experience with feelings is more of a spiral, I tried to capture that in the formatting as well, which also helps to neutralize the negative connotation "spiral" has when paired with "feeling.”