Who am I?
I hate being on the emotional rollercoaster. It's like I don't even know where my emotions will go or take me. One minute, I'll be feeling perfectly fine, and then the next minute I'll be reading a jackass's comment on Slashdot about how women only want men for their money and I'll feel like I'm an misshapen failure of a man who will never get laid. Then I'll go play some World of Warcraft for a bit and feel pretty "heroic" about my ability to slaughter innocent monsters. Then someone will call someone up on the phone in the lobby and bitch about how the company is screwing them. And then I will get righteously indignant about all the "abuse" that has been inflicted on me from everyone I've ever worked for. And then someone will say something about how the government wants to censor the internet, and I will get horribly paranoid and start trying to delete my LJ articles and Usenet posts before the NSA or CIA get them first...
It's like my emotions aren't even my own. It's like they're just a mirror of everything I see around me, a twisted funhouse mirror that blows them all out of proportion. Every minor inconvenience or irritation is turned into an earth-shattering cataclysm that threatens to unravel the very foundations of my life. (The happy moments are usually discounted, ignored or forgotten.) This happens even if the inconvenience is happening to someone other than me. I can't even watch movies where people undergo serious moments of stress because I identify with the characters too much. There's no clearly defined line where my problems end and everyone else's problems begin. It's like my anxiety is like the infant that cannot tell the difference between itself and the rest of the world.
So how do I separate myself from the rest of the world's drama? How do I avoid freaking out when others are freaking out, or avoid cringing when someone is angry? How can I detach myself from the anxiety the media keeps pumping out? How can I see women as partners in life instead of parasitic leeches who just want to take advantage of my weak emotional state? How can I share my emotions with people without feeling like I have to wall myself up? How can I be me instead of what I think others expect me to be?
How can I even be me, period? I'm so cowed, I'm so submissive, I'm so afraid, I'm so manipulated by the emotions and desires of others I don't even know who I even am. I want control over my emotions, and over my life... but no religion, no psychologist, no book, no person can tell me who I am. I need to either find out who I am... or decide who I will become and stick to that.
It's like my emotions aren't even my own. It's like they're just a mirror of everything I see around me, a twisted funhouse mirror that blows them all out of proportion. Every minor inconvenience or irritation is turned into an earth-shattering cataclysm that threatens to unravel the very foundations of my life. (The happy moments are usually discounted, ignored or forgotten.) This happens even if the inconvenience is happening to someone other than me. I can't even watch movies where people undergo serious moments of stress because I identify with the characters too much. There's no clearly defined line where my problems end and everyone else's problems begin. It's like my anxiety is like the infant that cannot tell the difference between itself and the rest of the world.
So how do I separate myself from the rest of the world's drama? How do I avoid freaking out when others are freaking out, or avoid cringing when someone is angry? How can I detach myself from the anxiety the media keeps pumping out? How can I see women as partners in life instead of parasitic leeches who just want to take advantage of my weak emotional state? How can I share my emotions with people without feeling like I have to wall myself up? How can I be me instead of what I think others expect me to be?
How can I even be me, period? I'm so cowed, I'm so submissive, I'm so afraid, I'm so manipulated by the emotions and desires of others I don't even know who I even am. I want control over my emotions, and over my life... but no religion, no psychologist, no book, no person can tell me who I am. I need to either find out who I am... or decide who I will become and stick to that.