Emotions

Mine is haywire.  Completely.  I sit and read the news on the internet, and suddenly something grabs my heart and my eyes are full of tears.  I listen to the radio, and suddenly a sentence will grab me and squeeze a hiccup from my heart.  Random sentences, with no impact on me when I read or hear them a few seconds later.

I sit and talk with my wife, and there is nothing.  No emotion, no feeling, no feeling because I have no feeling at all, nothing.  There is not even the emotion I have when interacting with somebody at work.  Just this lack of any feeling at all.  And then, hours or days later, I crash because there was nothing at all, and it took me that long to notice it.

At one stage I was suicidal, but at the moment I am just tired of everything that is happening around me.  I do not want to do anything about it, because I have this big fear of failing at everything.  Fearing that I will make decisions that will be irreversible, changing my life, and the lives of everybody around me, for the worse.  Not as if nearly any change will be better than this fog I am living in.

Why is our perception of what others think so important?  It is not as if they think that much about us, I know I hardly think about anybody else at all. It is not as if it really mean that much, but we still convince ourselves that we need it.  Is it because we just need confirmation for our actions, something to indicate that we are as important as we know we are?

Emotions define the way you live your life.  It defines the way you interact with others, it adds impact to any and all  interaction you have with others and it is the driving force behind all conversation with yourself.  Internal and audible conversations.

I have grown used to, and afraid of, the failure of intense emotions.  Damping them to a minimum, trying to minimize the damage, the pain, the hurt of losing trust again and again.  Growing stagnant around them, bottling them up, trying to compress them out of existence.

Adding and compressing at the same time never works, so I am trying to have just a small hole to stop a complete explosion.  Unfortunately, as most people know, the hole tends to get bigger because the pressure inside is trying to equalize, as soon as possible.

What will be worse?  An empty shell, or a broken one?  Time, as always, will tell.

Change

Something you get handed back after you paid for something.  Something you only get by handing over something of yours to somebody else.  Something you only get by breaking something bigger, of more value.  Something that people throw in a jar and keep for a rainy day.  Something that, when you are using it every day, implies that you are in trouble.

I forgot that it may also mean that you are alive, not stagnating.  That you are evolving, innovative, inquiring, full of energy and ideas.  That you are prepared to think new thoughts, prepared to take a leap of faith, prepared to trust.

I am, have been, in a very dark place for a very long time, and have convinced myself that it is where I belong, that I deserve no better, that I must endure it.

Maybe it is not true, after all.  Maybe this is not the beginning of the end or the middle of the end, as I thought, but just a pause.

Change.  Which way to go, which step to take, what to do, what to think, what to prepare for; I am scared into immobility, knowing I must take a step, any step to begin.

At least I started thinking again.  Maybe that is a first step into something new.  Now I just need something to focus on, something to reach...