March 3, 2015

Instead of feeling, there is a great void.

I want to feel something. Please, let me feel something besides the shaky, sick, dead feelings of stress. Please make me cry. Please make me laugh. You can even make me so angry that I want to knock you down. That's fine. Just please, please, help me feel something.

I'm drowning in fake laughter, fake prayers, fake music, fake conversations. Fake clothes, if there can be such a thing, because they hide my real hippie-poet self under a polished veneer of professionalism and confidence. Everything is sterile, lifeless, monotonous, impotent. Pixels. My world is made of pixels and paper.

Please, just touch my hand. Hit me. Hug me. Shove me. I don't really care, just someone, please, touch me and wake me up and make the world real again.

***

I'm discovering, again, that I really don't handle stress well. You remember how in Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester remarks that he has to take care of Jane because her body doesn't handle strong emotions well, and she gets sick? Well, I certainly don't claim to be a fragile poet like Jane Eyre, but I do know that my body is easily overwhelmed by stress. Between deadlines, less-than-stellar performance reviews, malfunctioning technology, long hours, and travel, I'm getting terribly worn-out and sick. I have some kind of low-grade infection that has hung around my eyes and nose since December; this week I've had vague muscle aches and nausea and exhaustion that even high doses of caffeine don't help. It's stress. I'm not sick; it's just stress.

I'm so afraid that this is "adulthood." That being "grown up" means getting stuck in these trackless wastes of bland, emotionless, predictable days.

Get up. Put on uncomfortable business-casual clothes. Go sit in an uncomfortable chair and stare at a boring spreadsheet or Word document or Skype video for 8 or 9 hours. Come home. Eat last night's leftovers. Watch some stupid show on the History Channel or PBS until you're falling asleep in your chair. Put on your threadbare pajamas and drag yourself into bed - and sleep 5 or 6 hours until your alarm goes off and you do it all again. And again. And again.

And then you die.

Does no one feel emotions in this strange middle-class adult world? How do they putter through their days so calmly and stably? Are they truly content with these plodding, level, safe, peaceful days? Or are they all pressing their boiling geysers of emotion down into hermetically sealed compartments of their hearts, too?

What could we do with the world if we were just allowed to feel?