When it comes to my emotional state, my mind has come to rationalize the semblance of a pattern of it. There are certain things I have come to expect: the general cheeriness, the intermittent despair, and maybe an outburst or two in a regular day. The pattern in the long-term includes a meltdown every few months. At this point, I may be a few months overdue for the next one.
Lately, the smallest things can turn my mood—a really good bowl of noodles to lift my spirits, or a really flat cuppa tea to dampen what would have otherwise been a fairly pleasant afternoon. And then, the irritability: for the most part, I can take pause and consider things from a more rational stance, but I still wonder about my temperance. If my composure can be affected by the most unintentional of triggers, then how can I expect myself to be in the mood for anything productive?
What makes me feel worse is when people who matter notice, and then they bring it up, and we have to talk about it. Because friends talk about pain and hurt and ruin. My intention is not to put on a strong face for them so much as to remind them that there are still good things, and I would much rather talk about the good things than dwell on the negatives, because chances are the negatives lead to a spiral of negativity—a positive feedback loop of heavy feelings that inhibit joy.
(I have developed a few new habits. Whenever someone says something to me that makes me feel moral outrage, I incite them to take action against my life. It is a marginal improvement upon the previous impulse to take action against my own life. I now fumble with the tigers’ eyes I have been given, taking comfort in the vibrations going into my ears and onto my skin. The under-the-breath profanities come and go as they please.)
Sometimes the image of skin-piercing projectiles comes to mind. There is a threshold for how deep a bullet can go before the trauma surgeon has to cut from the other side of the entry wound. Sometimes it feels like that: triggers and bullets through my emotional epidermis and lodged somewhere in the joyous meat behind a punctured feel-bone. The catch is that I am my own trauma surgeon, and the only way to fish the bullet out is to cut a way through.
Maybe I actually hate metaphors, or maybe this one works because I imagine that bullets hurt and negative thoughts hurt, and maybe there is an emotional body, but maybe not analogous to the physical one. I imagine this body to be constituted of positive energy. Maybe in form it is not like the physical body, but maybe in characteristics it can be. Bones grow back stronger than they were originally; maybe positive emotions grow back stronger than they were before because of negativity.
This is a forced metaphor. I cannot attest to its veracity outside hypothetical scenarios based on my own experience. I did not subject this metaphor to any academic rigor from any disciplines or fields of study. Maybe it is my own metaphor, applicable only to me. Maybe I am masochistic, seeking justification for the necessity of negativity.
The thing is though, I am ambivalent to pain, metaphorical or otherwise. Pain comes regardless of how much I avoid it, and I have stopped avoiding pain for a while now. The challenge for me becomes how I cope with it, and I am a mess of a person. My tendency is that there is a certain threshold of negativity in which I can no longer hold back. Small inconveniences on their own should not affect my mood, but a barrage of them in a short period set me off.
On the flipside, there are some big negatives that have come my way, and maybe my emotional self gives up, because those times, I feel as though I go on autopilot. My physical body does the living for the rest of me; I become a thing that reacts out of instinct and without emotion. It gets tiring though; I have to crash at some point.
Almost every day now, I encounter something that makes me tear up—usually because I become overwhelmed with positive thoughts. Almost every day now, I have to remind myself that maybe the time has not come yet; no matter how much leeway I give myself to cry, I find myself in a deep state of satisfaction. It is not yet time, I think, to despair.
Yet the despair is there: somewhere just out of sight. Maybe it knows I have grown used to it; maybe it lies in wait, knowing fully that I will be vulnerable eventually. Or maybe I still have a bunch of bullets in my emotional corpse. Emotions are difficult; sometimes I wish not to have been allowed them in the first place. I could have been cold; I could have been level-headed.
But again: temperance. I find that it helps when I take a step back from visceral reactions to negative stimuli. It helps to pretend to be objective, taking into consideration different interpretations of an event, knowing fully that I will probably go along with the one thought that is most convenient, most comfortable. I cannot afford the discomfort—not now.
(My tigers’ eyes glimmer; I need to stay calm. The tap-tapping of the keyboard has slowed. Have I been rambling all this time? My emotions are mute, but nod their concurrence. Sometimes I cannot stand metaphors.)
Maybe after I have had myself a good cry will I be willing to be discomforted again. I am a few months overdue. I wonder how long this will last—it feels like I stand on a ledge somewhere, looking up, with the void peering into my mind from my peripheral vision. My dreams for med school are dead, but maybe I can still be a trauma surgeon for myself.