See Gender Therapy: Day 000 to learn more about my hormone-induced journey of self discovery.
I HATE talking about my feelings. I've always found it to be a very unsatisfying experience. I reveal something very personal and private about myself only for people to make quick judgements about my situation and slap some advice on my way out the door. I HATE being told how I should be feeling. I HATE being compared to other people. I have these unique feelings because I am a unique human freaking being.
The first reason I'd rather not share my innermost thoughts is because my emotions are rather intense. I am not a shallow person and so the emotional depth of my inner squish is often more than a lot of people are willing to hear. In the process of my mulling through my own problems I consider a great number of things. I freely juggle worst case scenarios and plan out escape routes, prioritize the people in my life and count my resources. I am a survivor, these are things that I do; but it scares people. They are told to avoid thinking and talking about worst-case.
Mind you I always resurface feeling better about the fact that I don't have it as bad as some other people I know, but it's still too much for any peer to analyze in any given short term context. And so I'd much rather not burden them with such a task.
The second reason I don't like telling people how I'm feeling is because emotions are fleeting. That's just how emotions are, but people don't like to hear that. People especially don't like it when you talk about family with anything less than affection. For example if you say to somebody, "I love my children but...", queue nervousness, "sometimes I just want to not have kids." Unless you said it with the certainty of "I need a break", then they will assume you are a bad parent, possibly bipolar. It's as if you're not allowed to hate your kids sometimes. God forbid you talk about your partner that way. As soon as the negative commentary begins people start drawing conclusions about you two splitting up.
People also expect you will always talk about your passion with solid, stable, consistent statements. I find it's acceptable to acknowledge that achieving your dream job will be challenging sometimes, but if you dare utter any more doubt the negativity will be multiplied. An active listener will be thrilled to fuel your uncertainty with their own thoughts about how maybe you shouldn't invest your life into something that gives you such conflicting feelings. Yeah maybe that route isn't for you, but for someone who is much less doubtful. You probably are really passionate about something, and there are probably plenty of people who pursued their passions and doubted the whole way through and still made it, but should you reveal ANY inconsistency about your passions? Well your dreams weren't that great anyway.
Thanks friend. Thanks for understanding.
Now, emotions are fleeting, as emotions are. Having that said, I find we live in a very deterministic society which demands that when we think something we must stick to it or else we are terrible people who can't make up our mind and cannot be trusted with our wishy-washy feelings and indecisive thoughts.
Well, if you really think about the origin of emotions, you'll find that they are different each time because they're supposed to be. If you subscribe to the theory of leftover-instinctual responses from our hunter-gatherer times, you'll find that these emotional responses were important to our survival, and maybe even still are today. Sometimes.
For example if you are in a dangerous situation, getting eaten by a lion or something, it helps to have the feeling of being threatened. Even if you don't know what to do in that situation logically, your body is still alert and ready to move in order to get yourself out from under that hungry lion. That fight-or-flight response is still alive and well in each of us today and is the reason for many different kinds of anxieties. It's definitely a lot harder to analyze those sources of anxiety today but, you get the point.
Similarly if you are alone with no food or water in the middle of winter, it helps that you feel lonely and go out to find other people. Even though with modern day accommodations you can probably fend for yourself and ignore the feeling, but what your body is telling you is to get help. Loneliness is an instinct in a social creature that causes them to seek out others in order to increase their chances of survival. Nifty, huh.
So there you go. I hate talking about emotions because people can't handle me and would rather judge me because of it, but I am willing to defend my own silly little feelings because I feel confident that there is a reason for them, even if it is outdated by a couple ten thousand years.
Speaking of not talking about my emotions, for the past week I have felt very strongly, for long periods of time, and I am not used to it. Instead I am used to my own emotions being much more fleeting. Just as I was getting used to having happy mornings and exhausted nights, with an occasional sad day thrown in between, they go and stick around for a couple days.
The end of last week I've been happy, then angry for three days in the row, and now horny for the start of this week. It's interfering with my relationships because I keep yelling at people and I wonder why they're ticked off. It's bothersome too because I keep having reruns of sex scenes with so-and-so when I'm in class, or at work, or when I'm trying to sleep. It's annoying because once I get on one thought train I can't leave it for the next couple of days. It feels like nothing can shake me from this feeling until something else dramatically pulls me off course and in a different direction. Ugh.
Also I've noticed that I smell and taste much sweeter, and that my voice is ever so slightly higher. Sometimes my face seems very feminine when I catch my reflection. I've also lost weight, but that's probably because I haven't biked in a week and I'm bad about feeding myself sometimes.
I don't like to think about myself and others in such deterministic ways. (See first half of blog post.) I'm used to being an open minded and accepting-everyone-and-everything-around-me kind of person. Is this how all women feel? Intense emotions about something that they can't shake for days?! It's terrible. I don't want to hate the world for long periods of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment