Oct. 19, 2012 at 8:13am with 38 notes
blah blah blah
When I was a kid, I was behind my peers socially and emotionally. Very. Behind. It took a long time to catch up. There’s a lot of ways in which I haven’t caught up, might never catch up. I have trouble with some pretty fundamental “your average nine-year-old can tell you when they are angry, but I often can’t, and you can probably forget about anything more subtle than that until long after the appropriate moment for me to inform you of how I feel has passed”-caliber crap. That said, there has been progress. There’s been a lot of progress. A few years ago, I started crying when a good classical piece came on the radio in the car, and that was a big step for me. More recently (but still long ago), I slowly, but correctly, identified the reason for my body’s incessant shaking as “rage due to a person who was constantly complaining about people stealing the tiniest, most generic possible “aspects” of their character designs - to the point of obvious paranoia - appearing to have quite blatantly hijacked a significantly less generic aspect of one of my character’s designs, somehow managing to fly in the face of both their apparent sense of indignance about theft, and my self-proclaimed lack of indignance about the same”. This, too was a step forward. I look back on that situation with some satisfaction - I had a feeling, it was appropriate, I identified it. I am, according to some research, too old to learn new tricks and unlearn old ones with much success, but gosh darn it, it can happen. The downside of figuring out how to feel stuff is the feeling part, specifically the fact that it’s happening now, and not when I was 16. It’s like I get to be the angsty teenager everyone hates, except 10 years late. Because. You know. I was in the dead center of a pretty fierce bout of depersonalization when I was 16. Real, heartfelt angst would have to wait until I was present in my own life to feel it, not just some baffled, greasy spectator. So the angst comes. Yes, I get it, happenstance: nobody capable of feeling is immune to emotional puberty. Can we just get it over with, though? I’m a little busy for it these days.

When I was a kid, I was behind my peers socially and emotionally. Very. Behind.

It took a long time to catch up. There’s a lot of ways in which I haven’t caught up, might never catch up. I have trouble with some pretty fundamental “your average nine-year-old can tell you when they are angry, but I often can’t, and you can probably forget about anything more subtle than that until long after the appropriate moment for me to inform you of how I feel has passed”-caliber crap.

That said, there has been progress. There’s been a lot of progress. A few years ago, I started crying when a good classical piece came on the radio in the car, and that was a big step for me. More recently (but still long ago), I slowly, but correctly, identified the reason for my body’s incessant shaking as “rage due to a person who was constantly complaining about people stealing the tiniest, most generic possible “aspects” of their character designs - to the point of obvious paranoia - appearing to have quite blatantly hijacked a significantly less generic aspect of one of my character’s designs, somehow managing to fly in the face of both their apparent sense of indignance about theft, and my self-proclaimed lack of indignance about the same”. This, too was a step forward. I look back on that situation with some satisfaction - I had a feeling, it was appropriate, I identified it. I am, according to some research, too old to learn new tricks and unlearn old ones with much success, but gosh darn it, it can happen.

The downside of figuring out how to feel stuff is the feeling part, specifically the fact that it’s happening now, and not when I was 16. It’s like I get to be the angsty teenager everyone hates, except 10 years late. Because. You know. I was in the dead center of a pretty fierce bout of depersonalization when I was 16. Real, heartfelt angst would have to wait until I was present in my own life to feel it, not just some baffled, greasy spectator.

So the angst comes. Yes, I get it, happenstance: nobody capable of feeling is immune to emotional puberty.

Can we just get it over with, though? I’m a little busy for it these days.

  1. oldmanyellsatcloud said: Reduce concepts to their roots. Turn them. Recognize that most negative emotions arise from a fustrated desire of some kind. Remember change as the only constant.
  2. professorsteel said: Is this going to happen to me too…
  3. myainsel said: Until I was 24, the only movie I had ever cried at was “fox and the hound” (which is the saddest movie of all time), and now I near blub at everything, even adverts! Is it some sort of female time-to-procreate hormone shit I was never told about?
  4. heysawbones posted this