Boiling

I am someone who cannot be under-stimulated. That is to say, I will not allow it to happen.

I’m supposed to be, and that’s where these thoughts come from, carving out intentional sections of time where there is nothing going on around me and all of my focus is turned inwards, but away from my thoughts and towards my body and feelings. Lucy says, as this was her piece of homework for me, that doing so would grow this attunement between my body and my emotions and I, which seems to be this great big roadblock for me.

I previously thought that I was maybe too in tune with my emotions, too aware of them. I was able to pick them apart and find their sources and filter them through this lens of maturity that made everything manageable. I was good at articulating what I felt and what those feelings meant and maybe how to fix them. I could feel something, an inkling of heartbreak or regret, and launch into another blogpost that dissected those tinges all the way down to their most base forms, and I thought this was what it meant to be emotionally intelligent.

This isn’t a novel thought, everyone knows the dangers of intellectualizing their emotions. I just suppose I did it in a healthier way, I mean, I was aware of it. And I tried to not do so sometimes. I’ve cried in front of my friends, I’ve tried to express my anger and frustrations instead of bottling them up. But somehow, I never achieved that emotional connection with them, or myself, or probably anyone ever.

I’ve noticed this absence a lot in my life, specifically in my lack of emotional reaction to people no longer being in my life. A friend moves away? That’s fine. Dad moves away? That’s fine, too. My friends here got mad at me for saying we probably wouldn’t talk after I moved away, but… we won’t. I have missed one person in my life for longer than a month or two. And I thought of that as emotionally mature, too. Not being crushed by the leaving of a friend or my own leaving them. It’s not like I was moving someplace better, someplace that made the departure bittersweet. It just, was.

And these thoughts aren’t pleasant ones to have. Instinctually I reflect them on myself and the grand “Why” of it all is that I am just not capable of forming meaningful relationships with people. And that’s not true, I know it’s not, Lucy tells me it’s not, so let’s not stay with this thought.

Going back a bit, I have always thought I was an emotionally vulnerable person. I’m certainly honest about my emotions most of the time, I cry a lot (ask Jane, ask my friends, ask God). And I’ve always thought I was receptive to the vulnerabilities of others, not being judgmental and being comforting and all that. But I guess what’s missing, what I feel missing, is some feeling that’s supposed to come with it. My interactions with people all feel so… factual? Cold? The best way to put it is I think that after crying in front of someone, I should feel safer with them, or more seen, or understood and loved. But I don’t, it’s just a thing that is happening.

And it all makes sense. I don’t necessarily feel connected to myself, either. With my emotions, I tend to feel them just enough to put a word to it, and then I let the brain take over. I prick my fingertip and look at the pretty red blood and tell myself that’s enough to show I’m alive. I cry once, a big affair of sobbing and hitting walls, and that’s all there is – one big firework to end the night.

Emotions are an event to me, not a fundamental part of Being. There’s a time and a place to be emotional and to feel things fully, and it certainly isn’t now, or later, or after that. It’s some non-descript time when the sky gets too heavy and the bottom falls out. It’s a pot of boiling water, slowly approaching the edges, ready to spill off the side and onto the eyelet. And it feels like, to me, that the only thing I can do is let it naturally boil over every once in a while. And the fear I have, and I guess the point of this, is that if I do what Lucy asks of me, and I stop distracting myself with whatever and whoever and actually let my feelings splash onto the stove, that it will be bad. I don’t know why it would be bad, but it’s frightening. The only guess I have is that I’ll feel everything I’ve been feeling times ten. The advantage I have in my emotional life is I don’t know what all I’m carrying with me, what all I’ve pushed under the bed.

I am just so exhausted already, of missing Jane, of my mixed emotions towards my mother, of the job search, of dating, of, I don’t know, everything. What am I supposed to do if I let myself feel all those things, and it gets worse?

I know it’s the only solution to the real problem in my life, the problem of desperately wanting to connect with people on a real, secure level. I just don’t know. Why is getting better so hard?