Emotions, The Crutch Of The Special.

The extreme views on emotions is something I always find incredibly interesting.  As I mentioned in class, this is an area I am very familiar with myself for many reasons. When I was a child I grew up in a poor household, moved once a year for that reason, was in a school cafeteria in 1^st grade with half of the school (grades 1-5, mixed) with me when a tornado hit the school cafeteria killing some and injuring very many in rather horrific fashion, dealt with verbal abuse regularly; the point being, it was a rough time and caused a few issues to say the least. While it lead to a rather early interest in philosophy and religious studies, it also lead to a lot of self-reflection and self-evaluation. Like most people in these situations, I had a lot of anger and was not shy about letting it out when something “triggered” it. I saw therapists, but was left with a bad view of those in the practice, however I hated feeling on edge about the most idiotic things. At this time, I realized something else about myself that showed an interesting contrast the caused me to question how much of my anger and helpless feeling to it was actually my own doing. It always bothered me when people told me how “they couldn’t imagine……” about watching friends die in such a manner as an adult, let alone as a child, and that just seemed ridiculous to me. I was afraid, sad, in disbelief, but mostly, I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want my friends to die either. Really, that was it. I have seen a lot of footage from documentaries that showed images that were equally, and often times far more graphic, than the things I saw that day. I am aware that others have as well. I knew of empathy and thought it was something very common among us humans, I quickly found out that this was not so. People had to willfully choose to ignore empathy and essentially single out themselves and others to allude to some disconnect that is just impossible to mend between people. I still find that to be true to this day. I still listen to endless arguments that they don’t choose, it is just simply not possible. To this argument and answer I say simply, and belligerently, not only is that incorrect, it is incredibly small minded and outright lazy; an excuse.

Now, how does this correlate to my initial point of my seething anger and temper? That is simple, how could I so easily see how people were choosing to disregard the existence of empathy, and yet say my own excuses about my “uncontrollable” anger? I have never liked hypocrisy, and seeing that in myself when I was 11 is an odd thing to explain. When you are so young and ask these questions, you tend to be met with a condescending notion from pretty much everyone, and not having the internet (this was around 1991) made resources scarce. So, I read what books I could from the library, friends parents, friends, but mostly I just put myself on trial (not maliciously) over all of my choices. Through this I found that “controlling” the anger was complete non-sense and nothing but an excuse itself. I had no such chemical imbalance that caused a retardation of my mental functions, no mental behavioral disorder at all, in fact, an incredibly minor amount of people actually do in comparison to those who do not. All I had was a jitteriness and a tendency to lose my place and zone out a bit/become very tired (later classed under ADHD, another topic entirely) most likely due to seizures from PTSD from not dealing with the issues of my childhood when they should have been. Still, those issues I managed to work with and understand them as they applied to my daily choices. Why did I have to “control” this magical thing that simply existed? I found that answer was very straight forward and inescapable, I didn’t. In fact, I couldn’t. It only existed where I applied value and chose to be angry towards because I valued the opposite of what was occurring and in the “trigger” moment, I chose to become angry. While it took quite a while to come to truly accept this truth and then embrace it, however I did shortly before I was 17. To say this improved my life is an understatement. Realizing that while I have confines of birth that align a certain parameter to my physical capabilities, mental capabilities, health, etc, I also have more capabilities and potential to fill those confines with because I know that I am not in dispose of any mythological leash that dictates who I am beyond that of a minor chemical and electrical confine whose parameters I test daily without my choices.

To say that accepting full responsibility for your life is a difficult thing, is to miss the absolute stunning beauty and incredible joy of life.