a blessing and a curse

through my many years of life and cycles of depression, i have a pretty good grasp on my emotions and feelings. for instance, i can physically recognize five different emotions; furrowed brow-confusion, tight jaw-anger, pursed lips-sadness, tight shoulders-stress, and tight gut- fear. at times that is helpful because the recognition of the physical reaction reminds me of current distressful happenings. on a side note, it sucks to have anger and sadness so close together. there are times i am working through a situation and i can switch between the two emotions on a minute by minute bases.

my blessing arises from the self awareness of emotions and feelings. no matter the situation, i can pick up on what i am feeling relatively quickly. knowing this gives me the chance to act on the happenings pretty rapidly. this affords me the opportunity to to handle the emotions or feelings in a healthy manner, if it curse wouldn’t rear its ugly head.

the curse often cripples me in two ways. firstly, not only do i recognize emotions and feelings quickly, i also experience them deeply. this causes me to often feel overwhelmed by my emotions. once overwhelmed, they ride roughshod over me and hold me captive. the captivity causes me to surrender too much power to them. the bring-me-down emotions not only bring me down, they drag me down. the multiplicities of captivities contributes to my depression. each event, and the emotions that go with it set up shop, finding their own unique way to tinker with me.

also, when i feel emotions so deeply, it often times makes it difficult to share at a depth that i really need to share. when i do, it tend to blow people out of the water. regularly, people don’t experience emotions at such a level and that makes them scared to see someone doing it. that contributes a my fear of sharing at those depths. i don’t have many friends and if my depth of sharing might scare them off, i choose not to do it. the feelings stay inside and fester.

so, there you have it, my blessing and my curse. The blessing comes from the experiencing my emotions at a level that few around me do. the curse comes around because i either blow people out of the water when i express feelings or the fear i feel, the fear of losing yet another of my few friends. so, i store away the feelings. with that, my feelings become my prison.