Sometime last year, I really wanted to buy a T-shirt (or a few) depicting positive messages about emotions. Namely shirts that described emotions as helpful or pleasant. So I started searching through all the t-shirt sites, including Amazon, RedBubble, TeePublic and even on Etsy. Most of what I found were shirts talking about the *unhelpfulness* of emotions. For example, shirts that said things like “I have mixed drinks about feelings” or “I don’t have feelings” or “running from my feels” or the very simple “feelings suck.” There were a few shirts with sayings like “all the feels” or “It’s OK to feel tings” and I did buy one that said “Emotions aren’t a sign of weakness, they’re a sign you’re alive.” But I found many more anti-emotion shirts that expressed mistrust, fear of or just general dislike of emotions.
Although complaining about the lack of things to buy online is certainly a fun activity, I decided that maybe it would be a better choice to do something about this lack of pro-emotion t-shirts. So I tried teaching myself how to use Adobe Illustrator and I started designing shirts when procrastinating on doing research. (Is this an example of productive procastination? Maybe?)
The result is a fairly small but growing set of pro-emotion t-shirts on my new Tee-Public shirt-store. Most of them are pop-culture related, with references to Breaking Bad, Inside Out, Finding Nemo, and of course Star Wars (May the Feels by With You). Grad student Elise can be credited for the “feelings are like farts” idea.
So far only one person besides me has bought any of these (and she’s a friend of mine) so this is clearly not a money-making venture, but *I* wore one of my own shirts every day at the Society for Affective Science (SAS) conference in March and I will keep buying and wearing them to try to subtly (or loudly, depending on the color of the shirt) convey the idea that emotions can be felt, expressed, and experienced.
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