In case you missed it –  we hosted our first summer Summer Sip & Shop at the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, highlighting our newest interactive art display, “Wheels of Feels.” And if you  haven’t heard by now, the Time Travel Mart is our quirky curiosity shop that sells everything you could possibly need to travel through time, with 100% of proceeds supporting our efforts to provide free programs to students all over Los Angeles. 

We caught up with Tiffany Kimmel of Nihil and Friends and creator of “Wheels of Feels” to chat about her childhood, the tools she developed for naming and processing her feelings to make sense of her experience, and Tiffany’s use of “emotion wheels” as tools for empowerment and creativity.

What inspired ‘The Wheels of Feels,’ and how did the window display take shape?

“Wheels of Feels came out of wanting to address the complexity of my life without talking about it literally, while sharing a writing tool that I learned and expanded upon. The wheels are intended to help build emotional intelligence – the ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions.

I was religiously homeschooled in rural Oregon and was not exposed to tools when I was young that would help me identify, name and process my big emotions. I didn’t have much experience of outside thinking, and grew up believing it was potentially destructive. My parents, in trying to save me from negative experiences, ended up creating a dangerous amount of naivety…” 

In 2020, I read Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book, “The Body Keeps the Score,” and realised how little I understood my emotions and their profound effect on my body and mind. I had always thought emotions were negative. “Sentiment,” defined as a thought, opinion, or idea based on a feeling about a situation, was likewise a negative force. “Sentimentality” was seen as being easily swayed by outside forces. 

I struggled to identify emotions in myself and others. My counselor suggested I look at “emotion wheels,” one of many tools, like the Emotional Barometer on the wall, that writers and psychologists use to help people identify and understand feelings. It’s an imperfect science, and there are many disagreements surrounding the study of emotions, but after the pandemic, when many relationships in my life had significantly shifted, I found it helpful to stare at a wheel and identify what exactly I felt and why. There is power in understanding and naming things. 

How do you see creative people using ‘the wheels of feels’ for inspiration?

“I’ve found that the closer I get to sharing the molten core of my being, the more universally understood I am and the less special or ‘other’ I feel. Not all emotions are pleasant but learning how to separate and identify complicated feelings gives us much more power and choice over our lives. In one of the oldest known novels, The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, he writes, ‘If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things.'”

You’re encouraging people to come in and reflect on their emotions and decipher what some more complex emotions might mean for them. What do you hope people will take away from interacting with your new art display?

I hope that people come in and play. It’s fun to explore new ways of looking at the same problem. Writing compelling stories with great characters is hard, no matter your age. Like many things, if you decide to write, you’ll do different exercises and drills for the rest of your  creative life. There is a lot of freedom in recognizing the need to surrender and try something else. 

We are so grateful to Eric Oxford and Tiffany Kimmel from Nihil and Friends for their creation of Wheels of feels. Wheels of Feels will be on display at our Echo Park Time Travel Mart until mid-October, so stop by spin the wheels, revisit some childhood feels, and grab some time travel supplies (while they last).