Post by Alerith on May 10, 2017 0:32:21 GMT -5
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Although for the very first part of my life I didn't feel much in the way of happiness, sadness, etc. I've always felt the abstract essence of things very prominently. Erifrail describes this sort of experience wonderfully in saying emotions are like colors. To me, the world feels kind of like a dynamic painting which shifts in tonality and theme depending on environment, situation, internal thoughts, etc. It was through this kind of intuitive sense that I first began to navigate the world, I'd seek out places, music and things which evoked the most beautiful feelings. There was no attempt to control/suppress these things, resonance simply guided the flow of my being.
When I was about the age of 2, I had an experience that permanently changed my emotional landscape. It was my first existential crisis and the moment when my personality became quantified. Before this, I felt like a silent, invisible sphere which all the colors of the world passed through. There was no sense of 'self', I wasn't separate from all else that surrounded me. But then the moment came when being and life were realized to be finite.. I remember standing on the sidewalk under a dusk sky, staring down an empty road that ran through the softened landscape and disappeared into a dark grotto. This seemed a metaphor for life, and for the first time I realized that I was inside this little body that would someday cease to exist. I was mortal. I felt such a profound sadness, as if eternity had been stolen away from me and the world made tragically ephemeral. From that moment on, my soul was stained with that melancholy and the color of the sky associated with it; I was my own feeling/meaning, and separate from the rest of the world. This feeling is still sacred to me, it is mono-no-aware, and unless I'm detached from it in Ti-mode, is felt subtly in all things.
For a while I continued to feel either sorrow (sometimes mixed with other forms of beauty) or nothing. The stillness was a safe haven, a grounding-place, as others have described it. Emotion was just an automatic sensing of the world that would come and go. Then I began experiencing trauma, and learned to shield my internal world and resist the toxic input coming from outside. I became afraid of some of my emotions, and detached from them. This only became more severe when I started experiencing anger, which was terribly jarring and counter to what I thought was 'right'. I began auditing my emotions, stopping them in their tracks and determining whether or not they were appropriate. If I thought they weren't, they were dissipated or suppressed. Eventually it all overwhelmed me so much that I split away from the 'dark' aspect of myself and controlled it tightly with logic and resistance. This turned into OCD and I lived in compulsive anxiety for the next 18 years, hardly ever aware of any other feeling except sometimes despair or inspiration when it was strong enough.
In the last 4 years, I've gone through an extensive reparation which included facing all of the suppressed emotions and memories I had. I refuse to detach from my emotions now, and instead let them manifest while analyzing their causality. Happiness, sadness, anger and intuitive impressions alike, I mostly keep my feelings to myself, and use them as a means for self understanding and development. I'm still addicted to beauty and enticed by mystery, these I seek without limits. The injured state of my soul has manifested in my body as illness, and so I become weak at times and will lapse into depression. When this happens, I use self-analysis and/or talk to someone close to me to sort out the feeling. Ultimately, every state is finite though, and if all else fails it will eventually transition or fade on its own.
I love this quote from Rilke, it sums up the premise of my approach:
βLet everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is finalβ
β Rainer Maria Rilke