One of the things that came up during my Therapy Thursday today was my knowing that emotions do end.
Even the really bad ones.
The image I used was of swimming to the other side of an emotion. It’s ridiculously easy to fall into the trap of having a primitive “stop the presses” reaction to bad emotions coming our way, and when times are grim and survival is on the line, the ability to sideline those emotions and deal with them later so you can handle things is vital.
Indeed, civilization would be impossible without it.
The trick is with the “deal with them later” part. Because very often, we don’t. We just leave them on pause because we naively think we can avoid feeling the bad feelings forever without consequences.
Or, more likely, we don’t think about it at all. We pause the emotion and consider the problem to be solved merely because we made it disappear.
And that would be fine if it only happened once in a very great while. But of course we shortsightedly make it a near universal response to all unpleasant or inconvenient or otherwise unwanted emotions.
Like a baby, we think that if we can’t feel it any more, it must be gone forever.
But of course it isn’t. It’s still there in our minds, paused, waiting to be completed. And the personal energy and mental bandwidth cost of keeping all those emotions on pause grows and grows as more emotions are added to it over time.
Eventually the whole system collapses under its own weight and boom, you have depression and/or anxiety now.
And that’s where I am, and why I write for this blog every day. When I sit down to write, I am trying my best to take some of those paused emotions and take them off pause so I can finish feeling them and thus unburden myself.
And to do that, I’ve had to rid myself of the childish worry that a bad emotion will last forever just because we can’t see the other side of it.
I am in the grips of this delusion as I type these very words. I am scared that if I open the door to certain emotions, especially anger, the sheer power and volume of the resultant emotional eruption will destroy my mind and turn me into some kind of raving lunatic hellbent on destruction.
Because it feels that way. I can feel all that latent rage in me and it frightens me. Intellectually I know that I have to find an outlet for it all but emotionally I am so scared of what might happen that it remains unfelt and not dealt with.
A lot of badness, both active and passive, happened to me in my early life. Mostly it’s the pain of total isolation and unmet human social needs that weighs on me. I have decades of that shit built up in my mind and nowhere for it to go.
I’ve spent so many years ignoring that pain and pretending everything is okay just because I could make it through my painfully minimal day that it, too, scares me with what might happen if I let it loose.
Were I a more emotionally muscular fellow, I might be able to handle dealing with these potent feelings a little at a time.
I suppose that’s what I am doing with this blog, come to think of it. Dealing with my latent emotions 1K words at a time.
But I know that I need something bigger. Something that will help me give birth to really big emotions and therefore allow me to deal with all these latent emotions all at once or at least in larger quantities.
Because I want to be clean of them, and the only cure for emotions is to feel them.
More after the break.
Oh yeah, the apocalypse
Los Angeles is burning and it’s getting me down.
This is the first truly major international city to face the wrath of global warming, at least on this side of the world, and furthermore there’s a heck of a lot of rich people’s homes going up in flames, so this might end up getting the rich to truly pay attention to global warming instead of assuming they won’t suffer any of its consequences.
There’s crazy weather shit happening in other places too. Exactly as was predicted. We’ve seen this train coming down the tracks for my entire lifetime – and I am 51 – and yet very few of us felt motivated enough to really do anything about it.
And now, here it is, the exact thing that we knew would happen, and we have the gall to pretend like it’s a surprise.
People are going to start to want answers. They will want to know who to blame. And while it’s entirely possible to blame “everybody” because we’ve all known this was going to happen and we all “could” have done something about it, that kind of answer is unlikely to placate an angry torch-wielding mob.
All I can say is that if this isn’t enough to put global warming on the collective agenda, then nothing will be enough except the whole world being on fire.
I mean, Los Angeles is burning in January. That’s completely insane.
What the hell is next summer going to look like?
I can only assume that being a climate change denier will continue to become more and more dangerous, at first just politically but eventually physically as well.
I mean, I have been, somewhat unwillingly, been contemplating the humanitarian benefit of strategic assassinations ever since Luigi Mangione killed that CEO.
So much wealth and power is concentrated in the top these days that it is entirely possible that the lives saved by the death of certain key individuals would justify the loss of a single human life.
This is such an era of madness that one can make a utilitarian case for murder.
As for myself, my only instinct is to use my one and only move and just withdraw even further into myself. To stick my head in the sand and pretend nothing is happening and play my little video games until the fires, floods, and freezes make it to the door of this dirty old bedroom of mine.
But I won’t do that, of course. Even I cannot pretend that turtling up is a solution.
It’s possible that I could use my powers of communication – my voice – to help somehow. though I’m not sure how.
But things have got to change.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.