Unveiling my Emotions!
I am an international student and an artist who felt like expressing feelings and emotions was the hardest thing for them! During my third week of the new busy semester of school, I decided to start a new experience tracking my emotions for one week.
This is about taking you in a journey with my emotions throughout the busy days as a student. For this project, I needed to focus on details, and try to understand how each day is exactly going instead of generalizing the emotions we feel for the whole day. I focused on tracking the energy level of each day, my social life status, the music genre/artists that I listen to, and the overall emotions and feelings of each day. I journaled most of the emotions manually, but I had a backup data collected on Clue app.
Before starting this experience, I had questions about if the music is affecting our mood, emotions, how we interact socially, and our energy level, or is it the opposite?
For the first visualization, I made a digital drawing with 8 hearts and named this part “My heart everyday”.
Each heart represented a day of the week, the top part of the heart represented the daytime and the bottom part represented night, I personally see this important because sometimes our emotions get more tense during a specific time of the day without us noticing.
The white color represents the OK energy level, the red color represents the tired/exhausted energy level, and the blue represents the energetic me. The dark blue lines represent the times I cry each day and the position of these lines is important because it shows at what time of each day I cried.
The drawn shapes inside each heart basically represent the emotions and social life status of each day. For instance, the first heart is a lock because of the withdrawn social status that day, the line shows that I cried right before the day ends (before sleeping). Sunday’s heart shows how having a complex of emotions can look like even when the energy level is not as low as the other days. Wednesday’s heart has a low energy level but was socially fine and sociable, the crying session was during the middle of the day and the energy level started to gradually go back to OK by the end of the day. Thursday’s heart shows a crack that represents the homesickness feeling, which was there for a specific time of the day. Last heart represents Saturday, I went on a date that day and would say this was the best and the most stable day of the week emotionally, the colors show how the energy level changed positively from the beginning to the end of the day.
For the second visualization, I mainly focused on the music genres and the artists to see how this related to the social life status and the energy level. I started tracking and have a song player shape to represent each day of the week. The lower right part represents the social status of the day, and the left part represents the energy level using colors. Red represents a very low energy, the dark brown represents tired energy, the white represents the normal energy level, the blue and green represent the good and high energy levels.
The music genre is placed in the middle of the song player shape, while the artists’ names are the ones written next to each day, the highlighted names are the most listened to artists by me in each day.
Overall, this personal journey helped me understand and specify the emotions I feel every day and differentiate them from the energy level and know how this can relate to the type of music that I listen to.
