A New Dimension
I have always thought of emotions to be things that need conquering, pests to chase away and never allow to come back into the warm sanctuary of one's mechanical mind. As of late I have thought otherwise, trampling past trauma and making sense of my past on a daily basis, with help from others and sometimes myself, I have come to think of emotions as lively ships delivering precious cargo. For the longest time I have repressed or just been blind to these emotions. Some are so delayed that they don't dock my foggy harbor of a mind, even with luminous lighthouses cutting through the morning mist with katana-like precision, until a week after the inciting event. Other times it takes movies, tons of songs, and hours of blank stares to call them forth.
Knowing that I could not feel and that it was okay to feel was like discovering another dimension hiding right beneath my nose. It may sound like an exaggeration, but when I say I did not know I could feel, I mean that the idea was not even known to me. I always just used logic to move past any struggle, even on my worst days I just let them die off for the sake of surviving the days and months to come. I recall the past crushes I had in high school and spending weeks on end sucking out all the light and passion that came over me. Escaping through words, through music, and movies.
The mind traps our emotional explosions alongside our cosmic size synapses and traps them with each stimulus that dances along furious electrical pulses. I realized that our mind binds our memories, every similar experience or idea knots itself and becomes permanent in the mythos of our memories, and even if I gun down every emotion that comes at me they will come back through a song, through a movie, through a book, anything similar to that feeling.
It is okay to feel, and I know that now. I am just struggling now to start up a twenty two year old faulty motor. I have difficulty identifying my emotions at times, I just have vague senses of what they are, and it sucks at times because it feels like trying to do push ups after doing a two minute plank, my muscles tensed and weakened but still pushing for one more rep, one more my mind says. I hate this, I want to express myself with my family, I want to tell my friends what is troubling me but my frail emotional muscles are so delicate that even thinking about it wears me out.
Still I have discovered this new dimension and I will continue to fight for it. As I said, this is a bizarre realm to trek, men are stereotypically repressed to all hell, but I do not think this takes away from being a man in any way, still it troubles me a bit now and then.
I hope to show this new dimension to others at the most, and at the least create a little essay to vent and share a piece of myself. Thank you for reading as always.