Is the best compromise to trick your mind into thinking you don’t care……I have an equation for life that if you say/hear it you think it and if you think it you believe it and if you believe it you do it. Is that what happens when we so strongly dictate our emotions that they are no longer real just dictated by what we think they should be per situation because we have become so tyrannical in allowing ourselves to think and feel that we thus forgot how to feel or think. Does that make sense or do my ramblings make sense to only the chaos represented in my addiction to body art that takes place in my mind. I just don’t remember how to feel. I know how to feel, but to actually feel on your terms and not looking for permition from those around you but doing it freely and openly. Now you may read this and say what is going on in this guys head, does he need a tissue……but the reality is for so many of us we have taken control or captive our thoughts to only allow those that we want to come through and then block the ones that bring negative emotions or emotions we deem as inappropriate at the time. And I’m not alluding to become emotional at the drop of a hat, like the emotions of a woman facing her monthly battle with zeal. But I am saying that some of us have forgotten to feel, and not just feel but how to feel. We have had so many things happen in our lives that we chose what we wanted to feel and when we could feel it and became our own dictators of emotion that when we were validated to feel we held back, maybe out of pleasing others or not wanting to face the feelings we needed to.
Now what drives me to sit here after midnight writing away, its not insomnia its the past. Today as I finally unpacked the last boxes in my new apartment in Texas, I was faced with my past. From going through memory boxes filled with a childhood of joy to adolescence full of brokenness. To my parents wedding album and my homework from five years of college. All the way to situations I faced in the last two years. As I rifled through the past and not so past wishing I wasn’t such a pack rat like my father. I began to as most of us would and do, remember those times of great joy, hunger, passion, fear and regret. Now most people would say they don’t regret things, well seeing the note from the girl who you gave your virginity to telling you that it was a false alarm and she’s not pregnant, that kind of makes ya regret some things. But no matter what I remembered those feelings both good and bad. But as my time line grew closer and closer to today and the items in the box were more familiar and familiar. Those emotions gave way to numbness, and as I sat there remembering those emotional times and then having it abruptly give way to numbness, made me think. That when I left ministry I was so devastated and bitter that I turned my emotions off, I chose to do and feel how I wanted hoping to finally be in control of the happiness that I wanted. But as I did that I turned a deaf ear to the Holy Spirit and ignored it till it went away and my spirit was numb just like me. As I looked back today I realized I had healed from past mistakes and gotten over them, but had not allowed myself to share in the emotional release warranted by those. And that’s what made me begin to think that the war zone my life has been in the last two years has left me wounded and numb. But as I sit here in Texas and begin to feel my spirit rise and my soul rejoice I find myself feeling again. I could say that there is a connection that when we turn our back on God and shut our selves away from His voice we begin to make ourselves numb not just in our spirit but in our emotions as well. I look forward to shedding tears mostly in rejoicing as I desperately seek the voice that I have suppressed for so long to hear my heavenly Father whisper sweet nothings in my spirit as I lounge in His sweet embrace.
As I sit here almost bored at trying to write about emotions because I have conned myself into thinking that they don’t matter. I am faced with the picture of what my life has been.
As a child I would remember laying in my bed staring into the blackness that seemed to pulsate with every breath I took as if the night was a living entity waiting for my soul. As I would lay there covers pulled to my neck I would stare the vast pulsating walls of inky nothingness to see if there was any shape or form and even movement to the all-consuming darkness. And as I lay there I remember earnestly trying to find something for fear can be overcome by the facing of an opponent. But when it is nothingness no sign of form, desire or intent is where fear itself becomes unstoppable. And I remember laying there and as the oppressing fear seemed to squeeze my heart tighter and tighter with each pulsating move of the bottomless darkness, I would go numb not able to move, talk or feel, just think.
I liken the last two years of my life as that exact deadly mixture of fear and numbness masked by the pride of a man not wanting to fail or settle. On the outside combining knowledge with experience to fake it till you make it and hope nobody realizes its all held together with scotch tape. And now that fear has been lifted and the numbness is fleeing there is pain and discomfort and once again feeling, thinking and living. As head knowledge is turned to heart experience colors change and the world is once again new and exciting and endless in the possibility of roads that you will be asked to choose. All with freedom and the ability to feel again.