the elephant in the way
I have trouble expressing my emotions (see post: Cognitive Dissonance). It’s incredibly frustrating, because I do often have feelings, sometimes even very strong feelings, but I just can’t show them to other people. I have a hard time articulating what’s going on inside me, and so most of the time I just don’t even try. It’s not necessarily because I don’t want to communicate (although that’s beginning to become a part of the isue nowadays), but there’s just no way for me to get my feelings across. It’s like being on an island just close enough that you can see the one across the water, but the bridge has been burned down and you can’t get there from your island. That’s what I feel like. Sometimes it’s like there’s me, inside my body, the person I really am, and then there’s the me that experiences the world. I see the me inside when I look at my reflection in a window, and sometimes I see her on blank notebook pages. But there’s this physical body that’s symbolic of a barrier that separates the real me from the world I want to experience. It’s like I’m trapped on one side of the glass, and the rest of the world is on the other side. I can see it, I can almost taste it, but I can’t experience it. That’s the feeling I get when I watch the world pass by through my reflection in a car window, or when I watch birds and squirrels fly and skitter around the yard through one of the windows in the house.
I generally would like to be able to communicate when I am feeling upset, or when I do actually feel attached to someone. But I really just can’t. Partially because I don’t believe they’ll care, and partially just for lack of capability. And now I don’t even feel like I can be emotionally attached to anyone besides my family. After all the things that have happened in the past 3 years, I just hardly see it as possible. I’ve always shied away from closeness and personal disclosure and physical intimacies, and now I’m to the point where I just don’t see the point in any of it. I’m planning the rest of my life around the person that’s guaranteed to be in it: me. I can’t hang my hat on dreams for the future that depend on the existence of some significant other. It’s just impractical, and sometimes I turn my practicality into a fault.
In all honesty, I”m not sure what I really want out of myself or out of my life. I don’t know whether I feel like my self-diagnosed schizoid personality is a problem or if I even care enough to do anything about it either way. I may always be frustrated with my inability to communicate and articulate emotions, and I am sort of leaning toward feeling like I may never be capable of having a normal relationship with another human being. I see every fault in me, and some that probably aren’t even really there, and I accept them. There are a lot of things about me that I can’t change, and I feel like this may be one of them. Maybe my depression and my subsequent relationships have caused my personality to take a nosedive and crash into personality disorder. I guess I could live with that, as long as I have some explanation as to why I am the way I am. I personally like to have a name for the elephants in my way.
(PS, I’m kind of enjoying writing emotionally about lacking emotion and how I can’t express it. It’s kind of ironic. Well, a little more than “kind of”.)
life as a tea kettle
I drink a lot of tea. Mostly just Tetley regular tea, but sometimes different flavors too. I walk around impatiently waiting for the kettle to whistle, usually having something else to do in the meantime but not always. And sometimes I know how the kettle feels. It often sits there unattended, brimming with potential tea, until it’s put on the stove and the water set to boil. How sometimes I feel like I go unnoticed until my emotions start to fester and then become unbearable. That every once in a while it all builds up and I have to scream–at least metaphorically–to let it all out. Not necessarily even just anger; pretty much any emotion can come to a boil if left on a hot burner long enough. And there’s the expectation to show these pent up feelings, like I owe it to anyone to express the things that go on inside me. It’s mostly frustrating, and a little intimidating too. Especially when I’m not to boiling yet.
