Months ago I described feeling weird to my brother who is a counsellor. He asked me to be more specific and jokingly suggested he get out the Emotion Wheel to help me out. I have described many things as weird. As wide a range as: service station signage, the way crows walk, my hair in the morning, the way my dad's coffin was maneuvered around the tiny church where we held his funeral. In all of these cases a better word was possible. And by better I mean more specific. Something that would help a larger number of people understand exactly what I meant. For those familiar with me the space around the word weird can be filled in by their knowledge of my general outlook. But for others my use of weird may seem a blunt instrument, a square peg for a round hole, more mystery than clarity.

Our personas – what we show the outside world of our selves – are shaped by many things but I have been thinking this morning after finishing Olivia Laing's Funny Weather about how much they are shaped by the words we use: the words we have access to or feel comfortable with. I am reminded of Agnes Martin talking about the range of abstract feelings we don't pay attention to. Perhaps because we can't describe them, even to ourselves. The point of all this being how little we actually share of ourselves simply because we don't have the language to describe it.

Abstract visual language gets some of the way but it often speaks more of the gap between a feeling and a mark than the closeness. More work to be done. I think of Gerhard Richter's restless medium-jumping and how much that makes sense in terms of trying to describe the full arc of himself. Sometimes shape-shifting is the shortest route to accuracy.

Most of us find that some kind of focus is more comfortable. Audiences generally feel the same - expectations being met. Marketeers certainly like focus. For myself I can see how important it is to try and keep the windows open. Adding words to my vocabulary one at a considered time. Holding each one up to the light box of my past experience. Checking for resonance and possibly something a little closer to hinting at the truth I feel than weird.