ihavebeenfloated

My art teacher used that phrase in a class about a week ago when speaking about some piece of art that I can’t recall. “It’s as if it’s throwing psychological punches at you,” she conjectured. I laughed out loud, a short little laugh as to not call too much attention to myself, and then jotted down the two words. I’d never heard it before, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t come up with it myself, because it’s a feeling I’m so familiar with, especially now.

Haven’t we all, at one time or another, felt as if we’d had the wind knocked out of us emotionally? One minute you’re fine, and then the next second you find out about something, someone says something, or you see something, and you feel as if you were just crushed by a great weight? Now that, my friends, is a psychological punch.

It’s funny the things that can cause these moments with me, these days. The obvious things, of course, but then out of nowhere just bizarre things can make me want to sit down and take a breather. I’ve never been much of one to be affected so deeply by memories, but every day someone says something that reminds me of something that might have occurred years ago, or just recently, and I feel as if they socked me right in my solar plexus.

I hate it. It’s another way to be out of control of my own emotions, something I used to pride myself on, and it annoys the piss out of me. I realize now, that for the last four or five months, I’ve had absolutely no control over my emotions and feelings at all. Not a single lick of it is contained. I hope that’s obvious as my journal has pretty much turned into one gigantic emo bitch fest, though I hope I’ve kept it from spiraling down into i hate myself, my life sucks, i hate everyone, and i want to die which is something I’d hope I would never become (again), but I’m not really sure.

Edit: I have to interject on myself here, after having written this post, and clarify that there really are other things I could write about myself. But, for some reason, I don’t feel like I should. There’s a girl at school, who sits next to me in my art class, that I am attracted to and we’re sharing words on a rather consistent basis. I could, perhaps, talk about her, but what is there to say besides that? There’s nothing else there. I could go back to my Sara days and start going on and on about how she said, “Hello,” to me and I freaked out and obviously that means she likes me. But who wants that?

The first question is, really, have I ever not been so emo on my site? No, I don’t think so. Admittedly there have been happier periods where my posts don’t mostly consist of, “Hello, My name is Brad, and I’m a miserable fucker who refuses to get over the breakup of a relationship that didn’t really last long enough to be upset over for so long,” but all in all, I think my journaling has always been of the melodramatic variety.

The second question is, what kind of emo is better to be? The Sara days emo could easily be described as, “hopeless loser lusts over woman he’ll never get since he is in such a deep state of denial that he doesn’t even realize that he is really his own worst enemy because his own complete lack of confidence will forever prevent him from making the appropriate move, so instead we’re stuck listening to him swoon and pine for hours over something he doesn’t have the ability to achieve.” Do you want me to go back to doing that? I don’t think so. Or, at least I don’t.

The third question is, why can’t I just stop being emo? I ask, then, what else would I write about? My day to day life is rather inconsequential and boring. For instance, today could be written as, “I woke up this morning and sat on the computer for a while. Finished up the new design for my site. Hung out with Greg for a bit and watched him mow the lawn. I had dinner with my parents. Then I came home and sat on the computer for a while longer.”

My school days are even less interesting, consisting of, “Today I woke up and sat on the computer. Then I showered and went to school. Art was cool. That girl who sits next to me? Yeah, she’s cute. Then I hung out with Brenda, this older woman I sit around and do math homework with, before my math class. Went home after that, and sat around on the computer for a bit until I went to sleep.”

Who cares? I don’t. You shouldn’t. But maybe you do? I don’t know. I don’t even know what this interjection was really all about. Oh, yeah, why do I write so much about my inner thoughts and feelings? I think the answer is really simple.

I have to.

If I don’t, everything builds up under my skin, swelling to such proportions that I could burst. At this point, writing out my emotions is such a habitual aspect of my life that I usually can’t even go to sleep without writing out something at some point during the day. It’s crazy, I will be on the edge of sleep, teetering over, and out of nowhere I will feel this extremely depressive tug on the area around my heart that I can actually physically feel, and I recognize it as the urge to write out something or another. Usually I don’t even know what it is until I finally sit down and start typing.

So, that’s it I guess. I feel incapable of allowing myself to be an even more pathetic version of emo, and so instead I am just the semi-pathetic version of emo. Lamenting over loss is better than longing for something you can’t even be sure you need.

I think so, anyway.

I want to be stoic again. I want to live that stupidly happy life in which I was seemingly ignorant of the fact that I needed social contact to function as a human being. But now, instead, I keep catching psychological right hooks in my jaw that lay me flat out on the ground. It’s OK, I’m sure I’ll eventually learn how to duck and weave.