I had a sad dream last night.
As in, wake up and almost cry sad.
Feel like your psyche will be surely crushed under the sadness sad.
Dumbo's mommy singing to him sad.
So I got up (at 5:30 AM because my body has gotten used to getting up early again) and took some time to feel my feelings. Listened to a song that described how I felt, wrote a journal entry with lots of psycho in it, just unleashed the full measure of my insanity onto paper. It's funny how that process goes. You blurt it all out and then you sit for a second, waiting to see if there's anything else floating around in there. It's like getting sick. You toss your cookies and then sit on the floor by the toilet for a few minutes, just in case it comes back. Once it's all out, you feel your body begin to calm down. Your muscles release and quit trembling and contracting, the sense of dread drains away. In the case of physical sickness, you might drink a soda or eat some crackers to set matters to rights again. For emotional sickness, you turn to things like Cute Overload or awesome notes you passed with good friends where you chatted about how people who get doctorates are not superhuman, as evidence by the fact that some of them tuck their ties into their pants and use poor grammar and can't play the piano.
It took me a while to learn this. Or perhaps it is normal to grasp this lesson in the early twenties. I have this neurosis that dictates that I must learn everything sooner and faster than everybody else - it's yet another Right Answer that I must get. Gifted Kid Syndrome, I guess. Anyway, it has been helpful for me to view emotional health similarly to how I view physical health. As a child and a teen I noticed how emotional outbursts earned me scorn and punishment and mistakenly extrapolated that those expressions, nay the feelings themselves, are universally inappropriate. You can imagine how well this worked out. Pushing my analogy to the limits of tastefulness, if you get sick and try to keep it all in all the time and never release, you will eventually explode in some fashion. Something would happen, I would feel a feeling and then immediately be ashamed of that feeling, as if by just thinking it I was demonstrating how weak and immature I was. Adults don't feel these sorts of things, right? That must be true, because I get reprimanded when I talk about feeling this way (read: even an effort to get me to "look on the bright side" struck me as a reprimand...GKS again). I remember hearing about journaling and about letting feelings out from preachers, teachers, counselors and such, but it didn't stick for a long time. I think part of the reason was because I also love to write and whenever I sit down to write, my inclination is to write for an audience. Which, of course, defeats the purpose of journaling - it causes you to stifle the most intimate and perhaps distasteful of your thoughts. Now, I'm finally learning that balance. It has helped me view my emotional nature as an asset that furthers my creativity and enriches my relationships, rather than as a Mark of Cain that made me Immature. I do wish I had learned it sooner. I hope I can model it for my students and my children and spare them some of the embarrassment, frustration and self-hatred I felt as a teen.
I feel like I keep returning to this over and over again, but I suppose we all have thorns in our side and lessons that we have to learn multiple times. Takes 21 repetitions for something to become a habit, right? This introspection has caused me to look at other facets of my life that have changed and have made me very thankful for all of my experiences. My life thus far has taken me from trailors, Spam, Clorox-chlorinated pools and mix tapes to yoga, coffee, Perrier and Schoenberg. I love this home that Andrew and I have fashioned, I love these friends that God has given me, and I love this life. Even when I hate it, I love this life.
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