I am a roiling sea. I am the embodiment of a tumultuous, frothing storm. I am the physical manifestation of riotousness and disturbance and uproar. I am loud and vocal and loud again. Emotions cause my mood to bounce like a kite, a pinball in the deaf, dumb, and blind kid’s hands. Sappy commercials and a lovelorn Noah cause me to shed an actual tear.
I am cold, calculating, exact. A knife’s edge. An impartial observer making deliberate decisions. A steel-glass surface in a calm harbor. Distant and unfeeling and hard. I am a straight edge in a land of curves and ellipticals. A hard liner.
I vacillate between these two extremes. For most of my life, I was the emotional one. Emotions caused me to don my backpack for the Sierra Nevadas, to move 2,000 miles to the Rockies, and another 2,000 miles to escape feelings and fear of those feelings for a boy. When smushed together with other emotional, crazy people, I toed the logical side of things. But, left to my own devices, left to my own space and world, I am an emotion cannonball. Sometimes, I worry that my emotion—the crazy space in my head and in my heart—is too much to share with this world, with my friends, let out around my coworkers. I suppose that is part of the reason my only constant companion is a four-legged, elderly pug.
Logic is something I am getting better at. It plays a huge part in my career. I’m learning to make decisions looking beyond my emotions and how it makes me feel. Sometimes, when I explain my smart decisions to people, I feel like a fraud. Sometimes I want to scream, “I only just read this! I’d rather go spend my money and drink and get crazy and live life a little more edgier than the doldrum of my days!” I want to shout that I am a louse and a liar when it comes to being responsible, to choosing the right and adult path. What I want is for the emotions of feeling unbounded and endless and the possibility to come flooding back in, assaulting my senses, making me drop everything and getting caught up in the current.
Ah, but that logic. The reality of it all. The realization that monthly bills and promises and the sheath of adulthood bound tight to your body keeps your feet to the ground. Trust me, I know that logic has its place. It’s given me security and the chance to write inane and illogical posts such as this. My logical thinking has allowed me to keep my job and put a roof over my head and food in my belly. It has given me comfort.
But when has comfort ever produced the greatest stories? Isn’t hardship and craziness and love and hatred the substance of the greatest memories? When was the last time you heard, “Let me tell you about the time I had a full belly, went to bed at 10 and slept straight through the night”? I’ll tell you when: never.
I was the kid that never said goodbye. I left in the night or early in the morning and you heard from me weeks later, if at all. I walked the line of never-care and almost-there. My emotions pushed me to move on, to reinvent, to never give other people the chance to reject me. As the years tick by, my logical mind has been squeezing in more and more. But I still resist. I still want to dust off the emotions I’ve placed in the bookshelves, the corners, underneath the bed and behind the dog food. I want to let go of the guy lines that keep me anchored to this place and space and life.
In the movie Complete Unknown, Rachel Weisz’s character says:
As soon as people feel they know who you are, then you’re trapped.
To be honest, it wasn’t until I heard that line that I felt something snap. Logic traps you, logic is a straight line from point A to point B. Logic is this year’s filling spilling out with the same plain, vanilla custard of last year. I’m trying to come to terms with logic, with using it to put me in the place where I can let loose and grab hold of emotion and chaos and excitement. For now, logic is giving me my base. For now, logic is my hobble and my salvation. Logic plots one day into the other.
Yet, I’ve never wanted to know what the next day holds for me. I’ve wanted the unbounded exuberance of the unknown to take me and fling me into the void. A broken and battered life is perhaps more well-lived than a big bank account and tedium. There comes a breaking point for us all.