Your wheel doesn't need to look ANYTHING like my wheel.

If you get stumped, use a thesaurus to see what ideas it loosens in your mind. Rather than just printing out one of many dozens of emotion wheels you can find online, I encourage you to draw your own, and brainstorm the breakdown of how SADNESS or JOY or FEAR or LOVE can feel on a smaller, instant level. Revisiting ideas like can be a valuable exercise. Breaking down the big feelings categories into how they manifest as subtle emotions and feelings or expressions can show how we can feel 'hopeless,' but it can stem from sadness, from fear, from anger, or even some other big emotional category we haven't yet identified. I had often felt as a young person that when others got angry, I got sad/angry. I have been trying this year to really battle my own perfectionism, which is deep-seated and results in a UNIVERSE of procrastination. The one I've drawn here was a very top-of-the-mind, imperfect version and isn't necessarily a great tool for showing opposite pairings the way Plutchik's diagram is, but it was still a helpful exercise for me. If you'd like to see a much more formal wheel, just search for 'Robert Plutchik,' and you'll find the real theory behind visual aids like this to evaluate our emotions.

I had never heard of an emotion wheel until I was in grad school to become a therapist, and I was doing a LOT of reading on the side about the complexity of emotions. Some of you got to this week's creative prompt and thought, 'Mmmmm.what now?' Don't worry, you're not alone.

Plutchik's emotion wheel