French Fries, Nirvana, and Naming Feelings
How small shifts might change your daily life
I was sitting on a hard plastic chair in the musty basement of a tiny brick building in south Minneapolis. The air smelled dank, like a pile of wet laundry that was left in the washing machine overnight. Through the door next to me I could hear a brash hand strumming a guitar. My son was inside learning how to play his first song, Nirvana’s “About a Girl.”
After his lesson ended we headed up the narrow stairs and out the side door. As we walked toward my car, he draped his small guitar over his chest, strumming the chords he had just learned. When he sat down in the backseat he laid the guitar across his lap, brushing his fingertips gently against the strings.
“Mom,” he said as he latched his seatbelt into the buckle. “Why would someone name a song using words they don’t even say?”
I paused before I answered his question. Truth be told, I hadn’t heard “About a Girl” since I was a tween watching Kurt Cobain wrapped in a fuzzy green cardigan performing it for a live audience on an episode of “MTV Unplugged.” That was back when smoking was cool and people were wearing flannels tied around their waists.
“Can we listen to it?” I asked him. I found the song on Spotify and hit play. We drove underneath the canopies of green trees, hugging the curve of Minnehaha creek, listening to Cobain’s gritty, tormented voice. I do, need an easy friend. I do, with an ear to lend. By the end of the song, I realized he was right. There was no mention of a girl at all.
When we parked at a stoplight I turned back to look at him.
“I wonder if,” I started. “Instead of using a name from the lyrics, the he decided he wanted to name is what the song was about. Maybe he was feeling hurt and it made him feel better to write that song. ”
Later that night, after everyone else was asleep, I looked up the history of “About a Girl.” I too was curious. Turns out Kurt Cobain wrote it in 1988, three years before Nirvana grew from a west coast garage band into an international success. According to Chad Channing, who was the the drummer at the time, when Cobain brought the song into the studio to record it, someone asked him what it was about.
“It’s about a girl,” he said.
We name things to classify them, to put a container around something so we all can recognize it. Sometimes the names make sense. Molasses, in latin, translates to “honey-like.” The word “sandwich” is named after the Earl of Sandwich, who wanted to find something he could eat that didn’t interrupt his card game. That meal turned out to be meat placed between two slices of bread. Of course there are songs with the name in its lyrics. “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia” both come to mind.
French fries, on the other hand, were given a name that wasn’t quite as literal. French fries didn’t originate in France, they were actually made in Belgium by fisherman who, because they ran out of fish, were forced to fry potatoes during the cold, long winters. They used a cutting technique called Frenching, more commonly known as julienne, to turn potatoes into long, narrow slivers. American soldiers learned about the fried potatoes from French-speaking Belgian soldiers during World War I and — poof — they were named French fries. Belgian fries somehow doesn’t have the same ring.
Naming songs, or food, or even pieces of literature is essentially wrapping a package around an object to qualify it. A name makes something real. Names give us structure and provide meaning. Sometimes they make sense, other time you need to dig a little deeper for their meaning.
Naming feelings, on the other hand, has a very different result.
We name our feelings not only to recognize them, but to release them too. The root word of emotion comes from the word “emovere,” which quite literally means, to “move out.” That’s precisely what naming our feelings does. When we say out loud how we are feeling, we create distance between ourselves and that emotion. We encourage them to get out of our bodies and back into the ether, which lessens their burden on us. When we keep our emotions inside, however, they can fester, growing into weighty clouds that bog us down, like resentment or grief, or sadness. Sometimes anger. Not saying them out loud often makes us feel more alone.
Recently I had lunch with a friend who told me when they entered counseling they only knew two feelings: happy and sad. Only two! I wondered how it must have felt to be carrying the rest of their feelings around, going through the day disconnected to them, not even aware that they were informing the decisions they made. My friend has since broadened their inner landscape, or rather, reconnected to it. And they’re happier for having done so, as are the people around them I’m sure.
There are obviously more emotions than happy and sad. “Inside Out 2” proved as much with their emotional landscape of teenagers. As a parent of a teen, some were glaringly obvious. Anxiety, embarrassment, even envy. A 2017 study at UC Berkley classified twenty seven categories of feelings. Among them were adoration, confusion, disgust, empathic pain, relief, and surprise. I wonder how many songs you could write about those six alone. Or how many successful conversations you could have by simply naming them out loud and letting them go.
I wonder, even more, what might happen if we started naming what we’re feeling instead of letting those feelings spill out sideways and onto someone else, which seems to be happening more frequently these days. Anger, on a global level, has been steadily increasing since 2016. A 2019 NPR-IBM Watson poll showed that eighty four percent of Americans are angrier now than a generation ago. I notice it. I know others have too. But the thing is, anger is a secondary emotion, usually masking another feeling, like guilt, fear, depression, or even rejection.
I wonder what might happen if, instead of getting angry, more people channeled that energy into something productive. Like finding solutions collaboratively. Making a meal for someone you love. Saying “thank you” more often. Holding doors for others. Or even writing songs.