"This living, this living, this living..."

It's been some time since I've tussled with the profound. I've discovered that ignoring the emotional baggage keeps me from having to really examine anything. You can't really see your reflection if you don't look in the mirror, after all, and what better way is there to get to know yourself than by grappling with the emotional overflow?

I won't bore anyone with the obvious cliches that come to mind about overlooking emotion. It's bad. We get it. No one needs another pamphlet or catch phrase to remind us that America is full of mentally and emotionally stunted media slaves.

Despite how ingrained this message has become, stunted I became, and it has been relatively hard for me to unpack it all. There are so many threads that lead to nowhere, so many neurons that hold secrets I've kept from myself that haven't been jolted in a few years. It's a miracle of biology that our minds can store so much information in such air-tight, microscopic proverbial vaults. And so, because I don't necessarily have the combinations to them all, I thought I'd go with a more direct approach.

I wound up a proverbial wrecking ball, downed a shot of tequila, and let the river of crap flow from my brain into nice, bulleted lists. I really like lists, you know-- they're a natural, easy way to remind us that things can still be orderly, even if the things we're categorizing are neon signs lighting up the safe, precious darkness we used to live in, with charming phrases like "You're lonely" and "It's your fault."

That's what they read at first, anyway. I saw last year come barreling out of me first. I tried to stop there, to figure out some method of damming up the torrent of backlogged emotions before I drowned in them, but once you break down this kind of mental structure, there's really no way to stop it except to hope to God there's a buoy nearby.

I have no buoys, which leads me to my next emotional outburst:

I'm admitting to myself that I'm lonely now. Yes, it's emo, and sure, so are a lot of other people, but I can't care about that. I acknowledge now that I have to stop worrying about being some paragon of mental health just because people expect me to be. I'm lonely, damn it, and if pop stars can make bank by telling gazillions of people their problems, I can write a sappy little blog post about it without feeling guilty (there's an underlying tone in this post, by the way-- it's borderline offensive, but it's mostly just bitterness and I regret any discomfort you might be experiencing [sort of]).

Loneliness is this thing that just grips on to people. It hugs them so hard that it's suffocating, but it's really the only constant people who are lonely know. It won't leave you for another man, it won't tell you you're too skinny or too "advanced," and it isn't worried about the imperceptible future. It's just there, always harrying you to cry and be weak. The strong survive without complaining about it, for a while. Then a year goes by without really knowing what a kiss feels like. Then another few months. Then...

Then the vaults start to leak and we nose around in them, hoping to find the root of the problem, when really, the root of the problem isn't in the loneliness itself. It's the inability to express oneself.

It's fear. I'm fourteen years old again, I just realized I was gay, and now I'm afraid I'll be alone forever because how can anyone possibly love a skinny gay man?





--- in the same breath, I'm able to tell myself that this feeling will pass. Either the vaults will close up and vanish again, taking most of the debris with them, or I'll actually work through the flooding (emotional evaporation works eventually, right?). I have an incredible support system of friends and family members, and all of them prefer me smiling to me sulking around the Union.

The bottom line is, I suppose, that I'm aware of the reason I'm not sleeping well anymore, and apparently, broadcasting this to the blogosphere is as good a method of coping as any. Bully for me.