There are many different emotions that represent some form of confusion. Confusion, after all, is not all the same. It’s a complex range of different feelings, inherently mysterious due to its lack of clarity.
To be nonplussed, for example, is to feel as if one is in a mental tangle. To be dumbstruck, on the other hand, is to feel as if one has been stunned with the overwhelming impact of a situation where there is no clarity.
To feel turbid is something different, an emotion of feeling lost in a context that has become murky, as if one is swimming through a muddy water, unable to find clarity. The person feeling this emotion feels disturbed in sync with their disturbed environment.
People have long used physical metaphors to depict the subtleties of emotion, because metaphors arouse and maintain specific tones of experience more tangibly than words that are unrooted in the physical world. So it is that turbidity refers to a different emotional tone of confusion than what we feel when we’re dumbstruck or nonplussed, just as swimming in murky water feels different than being struck or tangled up. The touch, the taste, the smell, the sound of these experiences arouse different mental reactions. These distinctions matter, not just because they describe the problems we face with better detail than is possible with generic emotion words, but also because they hint at different sorts of solutions to help us overcome these problems.
