Understanding the theory, if not the practice
I did some thinking yesterday about how numb I've been to shit for a long long time, and I figure it's like this. I can feel proper emotion for one day in every few hundred... The rest of the time, I kind of pretend. I try to remember a time I've been a situation like that before I went numb, and I react that way.
The best way I can think of putting it into words is to say that I feel like Pinnochio, a puppet pretending or wishing he was real. I sometimes get frustrated by it and get a bit snappy with people, but they mistake that for anger directed at them. It's not. It's merely a bi-product of me getting annoyed at not knowing what I'm supposed to act or react like.
Back to the one in a few hundred thing... That one day is like a flood, like all the feelings that I -should- have had come rushing in at once and it's pretty overwhelming. It scares me, because it's so intense that I feel like I could drown.
So obviously the problem isn't that I have an inability to feel. It's that I can't control when or how much I can feel at any given time... It doesn't come easily, if not naturally. I'm glad my parents raised me the way they did, because when I'm back in that disconnected state of mind, a moral or heartfelt sense of right and wrong doesn't exist. But the way they raised me left with little doubt as to what is and isn't accepted behaviour. Don't steal, lie, cheat etc. And I'm glad they instilled me with that, or I could have gone off the rails hard by now.
I know I'm not inherently bad. If I was, I wouldn't want this lack of conscience and feeling to go away. I know I'm not inherently good either, because I can't feel what I'm supposed to in order to be that way. So I guess that'd make me inherently neutral in every sense of the word, but with the added benefit of being raised by great parents.
I think in figuring all this out, I'm not digging away at myself anymore or drinking myself to oblivion because I think that those emotions are real and that it's the only way I can feel them. They're not and it's not... I'm not hurting myself to try and wake myself up. I'm calm, I'm thinking clearly and I feel like I've got a good chance of working it all out and becoming real again.
And I think that in the end, I'll be okay.
The best way I can think of putting it into words is to say that I feel like Pinnochio, a puppet pretending or wishing he was real. I sometimes get frustrated by it and get a bit snappy with people, but they mistake that for anger directed at them. It's not. It's merely a bi-product of me getting annoyed at not knowing what I'm supposed to act or react like.
Back to the one in a few hundred thing... That one day is like a flood, like all the feelings that I -should- have had come rushing in at once and it's pretty overwhelming. It scares me, because it's so intense that I feel like I could drown.
So obviously the problem isn't that I have an inability to feel. It's that I can't control when or how much I can feel at any given time... It doesn't come easily, if not naturally. I'm glad my parents raised me the way they did, because when I'm back in that disconnected state of mind, a moral or heartfelt sense of right and wrong doesn't exist. But the way they raised me left with little doubt as to what is and isn't accepted behaviour. Don't steal, lie, cheat etc. And I'm glad they instilled me with that, or I could have gone off the rails hard by now.
I know I'm not inherently bad. If I was, I wouldn't want this lack of conscience and feeling to go away. I know I'm not inherently good either, because I can't feel what I'm supposed to in order to be that way. So I guess that'd make me inherently neutral in every sense of the word, but with the added benefit of being raised by great parents.
I think in figuring all this out, I'm not digging away at myself anymore or drinking myself to oblivion because I think that those emotions are real and that it's the only way I can feel them. They're not and it's not... I'm not hurting myself to try and wake myself up. I'm calm, I'm thinking clearly and I feel like I've got a good chance of working it all out and becoming real again.
And I think that in the end, I'll be okay.