A Pustule of Emotion

“I cry a lot. My emotions are very close to my surface. I don’t want to hold anything in so it festers and turns into pus—a pustule of emotion that explodes into a festering cesspool of depression.” –Nicolas Cage

I wrote once that I felt like I had the emotional capacity of a teaspoon. I think I’d read that somewhere else, so it’s probably plagiarism if I say that was an original tough, but I felt like it suited me. I valued intellect and ambition as a teenager and as much as I did feel emotions and try to love, I know I hardly ever let myself truly feel all the emotions my soul wanted me to experience.
In the past few years, I’ve made some more conscious efforts and decisions to feel more.
To feel better.
(Better as an adverb.)

And sometimes that sucks. Because it means I cry more. It means I feel less stable. It means I’m more at war with myself trying to figure out how I feel and how to act upon those feelings.

Sometimes it’s easy to discern.
Sometimes it’s not.
Actually, most of the time it’s not.
And the ice cream only numbs the feelings I’m trying to figure out

Sometimes I know I’m feeling…something…really strongly. But I don’t know what it is exactly. I can’t dissect it enough to know what proportions of what feelings are there or what events and people those emotions actually correlate with. School, work, dating, religion, future ambitions: it could be something from any of those. And then there are so many subcategories that it is simply exhausting to actually feel.



But even though it can suck to feel bad feels or be stressed about not knowing how you’re feeling, it’s awesome to feel good things.
LIKE REALLY INCREDIBLE.

And the more you’re willing to let yourself feel negative emotions, the greater range you are giving yourself for joy as well.

Which means much in between as well.

It’s good to cry.
A lot.
Because ain’t no one want to turn into a festering pus ball.

And I’ve been there.
And I don’t want to go back to pus.


So feel the feels and keep good, bad, middle, and who-knows what other kind of emotions close to the surface.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things I like about Indiana

So actually my brother Taylor started this list. But I liked it and decided to write it on my blog so that the whole world can have a taste of Hoosier Terre Haute and my family here. Some are about Indiana, but most are about the Woodward side of my family. My grandparents just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary so a bunch of my aunts and uncles and cousins and cousin-in-laws were here. The way my grandpa always tells too many details and it bugs the daylights out of my grandma. Today she told me that he skipped the days of school where they taught kids how to write short sentences. The way that my grandpa always walks hunched over. Kinda like my brothers. They'll be lucky if they turn out like him though:) The way my aunt April says "hey listen to this" when she wants people to hear a funny story. It's like a loud speaker announcing an anecdote. The way that you can escape the billions of people at family gatherings when you need some alone time. How y
Read more

A Little Death and A Lot of Grief

Image
  “A short list of what died that day: my daughter, me, my dreams, her future, all my gods, my laughter, the cabbage I covered my engorged breasts with, and this part of my stomach where I keep her sadness.” -Sarah Agaton Howes in “Lessons from Dying” I thought I knew what it was.  I didn’t know what miscarriage was.  Wasn’t it just a heavy period in the privacy of your home, maybe before you got too attached to the little one growing inside you? I knew the stats, memorized them when I got pregnant with Teddy. 20% chance of the pregnancy ending within the first 6 weeks.  10% between 6 and 12 weeks.  5% after the first trimester.  I learned new stats this time around.  1-3% of pregnancies end in the second trimester. 1-2% result in stillbirths (after 24 weeks). These stats are, of course, raw data, without accounting for race, socioeconomic status, or previous health conditions. Among Black and Indigenous individuals, these rates are much higher, as well as among those experiencing pove
Read more

"And what do you want to do with that?"

Image
It’s a terrible question. And a terribly common one too. An attempt at a get-to-you-know question that sounds more like an interrogation to me. Plaguing its victim with self-consciousness and uncertainty . You take it as a personal attack on your aspirations and plans and even your humanity and feel the need to validate and defend yourself, even if you’re not completely sure of your answer. The dreaded “And what do you want to do with that?” I live on a college campus where future schemes and dreams are constantly under construction , where the finished product is anything but certain. Yet we love predicting our hypothetical futures . Until we try to merge those with reality. But when we first meet people, we usually ask questions about reality (we being unwilling to share our highly-imaginative-life-in-ten-years-vision). Like where we’re from. And what we like to do. And what we’re studying. When I respond to that last question with H istory and Ger
Read more