Alexithymia

Thinking about this topic today. Something I can work on.

The trigger for this was that I’ve currently got the house to myself for 3 or 4 days. When I first learnt this I got a feeling of positivity. I was genuinely looking forward to it, having some good quality alone time.

2 days into it and what have I been doing? Not a lot really, not much at all.

So what have I been looking for all along to make me feel good? What can I do to feel good when I’m alone? I know how good I felt when I was with close friends, people I trusted and felt comfortable to be around.

How does happiness work?

I start from a point where I’m unhappy as standard. By default. I’m at my happiest when I’m getting outside of my own head. Overanalysing everything is not much fun.

So it’s for this reason I think that I never really embrace and appreciate the feelings and emotions of the moment. My happiness is tied to a projection into the future whereby I’m either living a life I like or I’m not.

What really drove me was a sense of hope and optimism with a degree of expectation, that life would continue to go well and give me what I craved. Fulfilling my psychological needs for security and freedom. And when I say crave of course, the addiction to these feelings is a measure of how strongly I feel them.

I associate these feelings with a black and white definition of good and bad and hence why they are so strongly positive and negative emotions. I don’t feel like I’ve ever struggled to identify the different emotions but I think that I have misunderstood the nature of them and how what they really mean.

And of course I’ve never got the hang of how to deal with them in a healthy manner.

I tend to think of them now as the spectrum between love and hate. These are the pure feelings of the moment and sometimes I can just let myself feel them. But only when I’m in a calm place whereby I can switch my mind off.

Love is a feeling that represents the force of attraction, hate represents the force of repulsion. Love is addictive and is harder to appreciate and to express. Hate is easier to express but less tolerable to feel.

And so what were the emotions that guide the motions?

I think in my case that confidence causes love and fear causes hate. And yet I’m not really in control of the confidence or the fear. Precisely because I’m not in control of my own future. More than ever, the world is becoming gradually evermore insecure.

The complexity of my emotions stem from the fact that they’re not governed by the moment, but the implications and the hypothetical consequences to be derived.

What should have been joyful memories of a wonderful past full of hope now become a bitter stain on the present without a hopeful future.

Anxiety is really the expression of doubt and uncertainty feeding back into the fear response.

What of sadness and grief? They emerge after loss, but I think they represent something much deeper. These are emotions that I hate feeling because I hate the fact I’ve lost. Moreover, the feeling is of profound hopelessness that I can never regain what I’ve lost. That I’m doomed to have lost forever.

Thinking about this now, I see a deeper connection between emotions and the fundamental insecurities I have about life in general. I can see the real reasons why I can’t get over some things, why I can’t forgive and forget, why I usually break contact, why I can’t deal with conflicts.

The best thing to do now is to spend more time learning to be in the moment and not to saddle myself with the full force of expectations that every moment will determine my fate forever.

Easier said than done though. I asked myself what is the best way to make the most of being home alone. Is it to seek maximal pleasure at all times? Of course not.

I still don’t know what I can do by myself that will make me happy but I set out to prove to myself that I’ll have more freedom and safety. That I’ll be more confident and less restrained, less inhibited.

What I actually want to do with my temporary free time and space is to do things that build my confidence and give myself a platform to feel love again. To do so in a way that doesn’t put too much pressure on myself.

Last night I ended up falling into the same addictive trap by staying up all night watching youtube vids. Needless to say that I felt like crap today and struggled badly with work.

Tomorrow will be a day for doing better things hopefully. Find a good balance between activity and rest. I like to be creative but I’ve been having nagging doubts recently that my artwork and music aren’t really providing what I need to be confident. I’m doing it for myself but ultimately I’d want to share it with the world and I don’t yet feel it’s good enough.

I need so much time, space and energy to create something in a way that truly feels worthwhile. I want to be more balanced in my approach which would mean I can’t pursue things so single-mindedly. But then again, I’ve learned that I have to take things one step at a time so it’s just more natural to me to work on something until I’m happy with it, then move on to something else.

Organisational skills I really lack and this is something I should work on. Taking control of my life means actually managing my life. Being the boss, making decisions. There’s little worse than having a crap boss who doesn’t know what he’s doing. So why do I tolerate the crap job I do running my own life?

If I’m ever going to achieve the dream of being independent, I’d better make sure I can do it well.

Thanks as always for reading

Fond Regards,

Jamie