Emotions

Faces taken from the Wong-Baker Pain Scale

I touched on this briefly. Emotions. What are they? Are they useful, or just to betray us? What is the purpose?

When I first began talking with my doctor she asked what I wanted to accomplish. The main thing was to get rid of this fear, to get rid of my mother’s voice in my head. The other was to understand emotions. To recognize what they were without becoming overwhelmed.

I mentioned before that I was like a robot throughout my childhood. I didn’t show emotions. In my house, I really just don’t think I was allowed. My mother was wild. She’d cry and scream; she’d show anger and hostility, she’d wallow in depression and laugh hysterically. They were all over the map. But when I cried? “Crocodile tears,” she’d say as my brother laughed. “Just wants attention. Look at the robot cry.”

Emotions denied.

So I never learned. Sesame Street couldn’t teach me. Happy, sad, angry, mad. Nope, didn’t understand them at all. What I knew? Numb. That was it. Full emotional anesthesia at an early age. And my family tried, they constantly tried to get rises out of me. I remember when we were younger my mother would sing this song to make my brother and I cry. When I thought I was ready to write about this all a year ago, that was one of the more vivid memories:

One day my mother came into the living room and in a sad enthralling voice began to sing, “Hush little baby don’t you cry. . . .you know your mama was born to die- ie.” My brother began to whimper. His tears were ignored as my mother continued the song, “It’s too late my brother – It’s too late, but never mi-ind. All my sorrows Lord- soon be over.”

My brother began to scream and kick the floor. “You’re not going to die!” he spat out of a face swollen with anguish. My mother smiled down at him.

“Yes I will sweetie,” she cooed, “of course I’ll die.” From that day forward “Hush Little Baby” became my mother’s favorite song.

My mother took my brother into her lap that first time she sang. She explained that the song was written by a woman she believed was her grandmother, a slave that was beaten horribly with “whips that sliced her skin like the meat slicer at the deli. The whips just sliced right in like she was ham.” She stared at my brother, her eyes gleaming as his, puffy and red, streamed tears. His little body shivered from the force of the emotion being released.

As my mother stared at him, she began to sing again, watching greedily as he reached out to wrap his fragile arms around her. She set him to the ground, smiled, and sang louder – standing up to use the full force of her diaphragm until every mournful note bounced around the house. They bounced off of our green striped peach floral couch handed down to us from an old neighbor, bounced off of the rabbit ear antenna covered in aluminum foil on the television which rested on a shelf made from cinderblocks and planks of wood stolen from a construction site. Her song bounced around my head, the feelings of sorrow and loss and glee and power – the power of a song that no one could make you stop singing. It bounced into the recesses of my mind and I left it there, ignoring the pull for emotion, to respond.

But, I couldn’t focus. Worse still, I wanted to slip it into fiction, to not face the fact that it was real. That my life was real.

In my household, everything, even emotions were for her amusement, to satisfy her power-hungry ways. And I wasn’t going to give in. She wielded her emotions like a hammer, like the whip in her story – lashing into each and every one around her until I saw them as nothing more than a weakness that she fed off of. Or as a weapon I didn’t want to use.

Thus, when I first started crying, when I first started recognizing I was happy, I thought I was sick. I was terrified I was bi-polar. How can I feel so good one day and sad the next? When good thinks started to happen I’d be ecstatic, and then something bad would happen and I might drop. Was this normal? I was driving myself crazy just thinking that I was crazy.

Recently, in acknowledging my depressive episode, it forced me to recognize that I was happy. Somewhere there is that range of human emotions within me, struggling to come out. As with every post, it’s a long hard road that I’m on, but I’m on it. It’s funny really, I’ve always been really good at reading emotions in others, which could be from how necessary it was that I read how my mother was feeling each minute to try and predict what was going to happen. There was no better storm tracker than I when it came to my mother, not that I could avoid the damage when she let a hurricane rip, but there’s comfort in knowing what another’s feeling. In fact, it got to such a degree my mother thought I inherited her emotions. And there it is again, her stealing everything from me, even my emotions became hers. She thought I was an empath for a while too, like Dianna Troi from Star Trek: Generations.

That whole time while I could read others, I wasn’t an active participant in my own emotions and even now sometimes it scares me with the force that these suckers, so long repressed, come out. Now my friends and I joke that the first man I love won’t survive all this pent up energy, that it’s leaking out my sides at this point. I don’t fear emotions as much anymore, but I certainly don’t understand them like I wish I could. Maybe the point isn’t even understanding, just acceptance. Accept that they are there and use them without fear.

I still want a flip book though, like for little kids. I want a reminder of the myriad of choices I have as to how I feel. It’s not just all fear and confusion. There’s way more to this life. Some days I feel like a newborn, and I don’t think that that’s a bad thing.