12/19 Public Journal
I saw a friend yesterday and they told me they were feeling weird (this is not verbatim) seeing me because they had been reading my public journals. And they had wanted to reach out but didn't and also just had wondered if some of the things I had written applied to them (about friends just disappearing etc). I've received similar feedback before when I'm speaking of being lonely to friends and they are like, what am I ? Chopped liver ?
It's weird feeling sometimes like I have no friends (I get philosophical about what qualifies the word friend) and then looking around and seeing a bunch of people who consider themselves my friends, and I them, to varying degrees.
This is part of this public journal experiment. Or my whole life experiment at this time. Hear me out.
I used to be able to apply logic & reason to some of my emotions and get them to subside. But I got to a point where I noticed that wasn't seeming to work anymore. Certain things would just eat at me no matter how I tried to logic them. This became a very intense time on many levels. It just became harder and harder to convince myself out of having certain emotions. At first when I was used to being able to control my emotions and I couldn't anymore, I freaked out a lot. Super frustrating and vulnerable. I think I would try to just avoid telling people about them at all and if a situation became too much to conceal, I would just explode out all squirrely in many directions like a potato ricer. And then feel ashamed.
I can feel there are parts of this dynamic still working themselves out through me and it's not super easy to write about at this time. I'll just stick to what seems clearer.
There's a part of my Gene Keys profile that says I'm currently revisiting the time in my life when I was developing my emotional intelligence, from ages 7-14. And one of my main themes is kindness/meanness. That made a lot of sense to me because this is definitely something I've dealt with for a long time since one thing that happens to me when I'm very upset or disregulated is I can suddenly become harsh or mean to people I love. When I started this inquiry around kindness and meanness I realized that when I'm in these upset states, I have absolutely no idea why I would not be mean to those near me, because that's how I feel, that's how it's occurring to me. I've noticed it's weird to explain because for some people it seems very clear and obvious why not to be mean to someone they care about. But when I stopped being able to logic and reason my emotions away, it stopped being enough reason not to do something, just because people or I say it's a good thing to do. I mean, even now I can say that I can see why being nice is the preferred method of communication. However I strangely don't knnooowww that in a way that's integrated into my body or whole being. Otherwise, it would not be available for me to act meanly toward someone, even if I was upset.
So from an accumulation of different experiences and messages I'm now at the place of, just do the thing that I don't know how or why not to do.
Oof, I feel I could add so many caveats to that statement, but I'm not going to right now.
Writing openly on Facebook like this is one of the things people and myself have told me, we are advised not to do. But because I felt a natural pull to do so, and I didn't knnnoowwww why I'm not supposed to, I decided to just do it, to find out for myself. Okay tiny caveat, there's things I wouldn't choose to just do anyway, if I had an inkling that it would cause more hurt and trouble than it would good, I'd try to find out another way.
Of course my philosopher asks, who are we to decide what's truly good or not for people anyway.
But see, with this mind of a constant unraveler of convention, it becomes hard to really know what to do ever then !
So to loop it back around, it isn't enough any longer for me to just tell myself I have a bunch of friends, and then I will not feel lonely anymore.
I am actively working on acknowledging what I do have, and practicing honoring that right now.
But, I currently seem to be able to accept my experiencing enough to let myself state out loud what's going on for me, even if it makes no sense to who I think I should be.
Because I feel it matters for some reason, of which sometimes I can tell and sometimes less so. Meaning, it is telling of something beyond just me right now, something that unlocks a bunch of fascinating insights if I allow it to tell it's story.
But also, because it doesn't matter at all why they're there ! My emotions aren't even mine to begin with. So it could also be just a study in woah, wow, okay, fine.
Until I do something different.
