ebbs and flows
fueled by a mild caffeine craze
A bitch is up early writing this because I have a lot of more important things on my to-do list for today, but my priorities are out of whack, so I’m of course going to write this first so that I can dedicate the most time and energy to the one task that will not further my Ayurveda/esthetics/yoga career (you know, the career I am paying to learn). I woke up with the famous, famous song Chicken Soup stuck in my head, and let me tell you, waking up already mentally bumping Skrillex is an incredibly aggressive way to start the day.
Remember all of those experiments I did where I stopped being on my phone? Turns out the efforts didn’t last long; I’m on my phone more now than ever and feeling extremely anxious every second of every day. I open my phone without ever knowing what I’m looking for and always become stressed, whether or not I do end up finding it. Also, remember how I said I wasn’t drinking caffeine anymore? I have been getting coffee more often than not this month, and this morning, I sat down with a full, home-brewed cup to write this newsletter. Then I procrastinated so long that I had to briefly turn into my mother and reheat it in the microwave. Except for I put creamer in mine and she doesn’t. I can feel the caffeine coursing through my veins and thumping in my brain and yet I still want another cup? One of these days I’ll take my well-being seriously enough to stop doing this to myself. Seeing how I behave on caffeine makes the idea of cocaine absolutely horrifying to me. I don’t enjoy being drunk or high but I also don’t enjoy being sober. My only escape is sleep and lately, my dreams have been so wild that I can’t catch a break, even when I’m unconscious.
Earlier this week, I dreamt that the road turned sideways while I was driving on it and a tiny, tiny human (roughly 8 inches tall but with a head that was too large and round for its body) faceplanted onto the road and I had to carry it around asking who it belonged to and then there was a spider hanging from the ceiling in a zoo, making weird pre-recorded alarm sounds and then the monkey exhibit had a conservative in a cage, flinging his opinions like feces. All of this (and more) happened within the span of about ten minutes. Remember when science and culture were sort of perpetuating the narrative that dreams all took place within the span of about three minutes? What ever happened to that? Did we disprove that? It feels like it can’t possibly be true.
Do you see what I mean about caffeine doing crazy things to my brain? I came here to write about my feelings and suddenly I’m writing an entire paragraph about an unhinged dream I had two nights ago. Every night this week has been more or less the same thing; fall asleep, have a psychotic and stressful dream, wake at 4:00 and wonder how to interpret it, fall back asleep, be exhausted when my alarm goes off at 5:00. Why is it that I can go to bed at 11 on a weekend and spring out of bed at 5:00 with no problem, but I try to go to bed at 9 on a weeknight and when my alarm goes off I feel like death?
In between my absurd dreams, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people about how they’re feeling, and wondering why I do or don’t feel the same. I often find myself absently doing this thing (which might make me a sociopath) where I break down and evaluate emotions, trying to pick apart what causes them and what each of them really mean. I do this frequently, both when experiencing pain so deep I think I’ll never emerge, and while numbly watching other people muddle through what my Ayurveda teacher likes to call “the traumas and dramas of life.”
When I’m feeling a particular emotion strongly, it is, of course, impossible for me to imagine feeling any other way, but at the same time, when I feel neutral, it becomes difficult to picture anything that might elicit any sort of emotion from me, positive or negative. I envision winning the lottery and losing my entire family while feeling more stoic than Kanye looks in every single picture. Recently, I have been wondering if I might go through emotions in a more sedated way than everyone else. Feelings seem to flow like waves, but my feelings are the docile waves of Lake Michigan, while everyone else is being tossed around in the fifteen-foot waves of the Pacific Ocean on the coast of Mexico after an offshore earthquake. My waves of emotion are still there, but smaller, less salty, and less likely to drown me. Even my anxiety, which I’ve often described as crippling and debilitating, often seems less severe than some of the anxious episodes and panic attacks my friends describe to me. I know I shouldn’t be comparing mental illness, and that I shouldn’t feel bad that my own isn’t ‘bad enough’ (in fact, I should probably feel grateful), but it’s difficult not to feel imposter syndrome when a friend has a panic attack over something about which I merely hyperventilated for three minutes before getting distracted and promptly forgetting.
I remember my childhood self growing exasperated at the lack of concrete ways to express and compare such abstract concepts as feelings. For someone who grew up claiming to hate math and science and only care about the arts, I have always taken a rather analytical approach to the simple act of feeling, and I never felt that I was able to properly convey my sea of emotions in any of the countless, angst-filled, paintings or poems I contrived throughout high school. Never one to feel without analyzing and hypothesizing, I wanted the tougher aspects of the human experience wrapped up nicely into an easy-to-read line graph that would show me exactly how I felt at various points throughout my life. I have literally tried graphing my own emotions before, but found it difficult to maintain consistency and judge each point on the same scale as the day before, as each day would bring new life experiences and reference points that would shift and expand my simple scale of 1-10, making it impossible to tell if a 4/10 was the same from day to day.
As a kid, I often found myself so disconnected from my feelings that I wished for some sort of emotion meter: a lie detector-esque machine with little pads that would stick to my head and my chest, in order to read if my feelings were really more intense or at all different than they had been at any point before. At events like funerals and weddings, I wished for graphs showing me how my grief or excitement compared to that of everyone else in the room. Even today, I catch myself daydreaming about being hooked up to a machine that would read, I don’t know, neuron synapses(?) and provide a definitive answer to the nagging question “when was I the happiest?” as if that’s something that cannot be judged or intuited, but needs to be scientifically measured. I often wished for a mathematical equation that would calculate my feelings about certain situations, and present me with a pie chart that would tell me I felt 60% happy, 20% confused, 12% anxious, 6% dread, and 2% joy, or a printout explaining that I felt 10% more depressed than the day before, or a document that would declare what my true favorite food was, based on the range of emotions I felt while eating.
As an adult, I have more or less grown out of the desire to plot my emotions on a chart, mostly because I realized the technology doesn’t, and may never, exist. The thing about emotions is that they are entirely subjective, which I think is part of why I struggle so much with them. By nature, feelings have to be felt and not measured, that’s why they’re called feelings and not measurements. I guess, in a way, my desire to study my emotional patterns is part of the reason I started journaling; journal entries serve as the most accurate data points available, in a field where accuracy and data points don’t really exist.
I do sometimes wonder if my constant need to dissect my feelings is part of what made it so difficult to ever admit to experiencing them as a child. And I wonder if denying my feelings, in turn, hindered me from experiencing the full human range of emotions, leaving me with a muted palette of yellow, green, and blue, never able to experience the vibrancy of red or the depths of violet. This is another metaphor that may or may not add to my story, but was fun to write, so I’m leaving it in.
Somehow against all odds, I’ve become someone who frequently uses heart emojis and publishes every feeling I have on the internet for my friends, family, and even random unlucky strangers to encounter on a weekly basis. Scientists are still trying to figure out what cosmic shift could have caused this. Sometimes I wonder if the things I write here are relatable parts of a shared human experience, or indicative of a more austere mental illness.
Either way, I wrote you some poems.
independently owned
I’m drinking gin in the shower
and ordering water at the bar
it is so expensive to be alive
I don’t want to work I just
want to cultivate vibes
locally programmed
I’ve been thinking about
starting a scrapbook lately
if that’s not a cry for help
I don’t know what is
I’m walking everywhere and running
out of time
which isn’t real, remember?
I used to care about traveling and now
I can’t even leave my bed
nightime bruxism
my phone is at 69% again
it seems to be happening faster
and faster these days
you fingered me with my mouthguard in
I know my mom is reading this
it takes one blonde to change a lightbulb
how many professionals does it take
to change me?
Once again, I am coming to you with the world’s smallest, vainest photo dump. I know this is everyone’s favorite part and I am a disappointment to my fans! I’ll do better eventually. For now, enjoy a few selfies I took this week.
As always, thanks for being here and invading my privacy. If you haven’t subscribed, maybe consider doing that and if you have, maybe consider telling a friend. Or don’t! Either way, have a great week and find somebody to be nice to.
lol (lots of love),
serena