Where do you keep your feelings?
I keep mine in the squishy parts beneath the bones in my chest. I vomit up my feelings and break pencils and scream and hit things all before hurling myself towards something that would pierce the squishiness just to make sure a hard reset is something I can control again.
Do you feel the same way too? Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever been sitting on a couch underneath fluorescent lights when all of a sudden your chest stops moving up and down and you stand up too fast and run to the back door to fumble with the deadbolt so you can get outside? Has your vision ever turned yellow and then brown and then black while your ears rang and in your head the first few times it happened you thought maybe you were having some kind of heat stroke? In 11th grade did you find out that’s actually a panic attack? Has it ever happened to you in the middle of important conversations and then you have to sit down all while feeling horrible because the last thing you wanted was to make the person you were talking to feel bad or like they caused the weird yellow thing to happen?
Courtney looked at me funny when I told her I’m too scared to sleep in my own bed and that for the last two weeks since moving out I’ve slept on the couch. I don’t toss or turn and I wake up with a stiff neck. Now I can’t breathe correctly and she’s out of town.
I like to place blame, so let’s. Most things fall back onto the person who perpetrated them—that would be me in all cases involving myself.
It is my fault my chest hurts. I convinced myself I am sick and that’s all I talk about now. In the morning I wake up fine but by the evening I am bent over with my head between my knees wishing I could reach into my body and pull out whatever was hurting me. It is my fault that I argue and then cry during the arguments because for some reason I can think of nice, cohesive words in my head but I cannot say them correctly or get the other person to want to understand exactly what I meant for the weird words to be.
Although my mother instilled a love of shopping in me as a way to fix whatever badness I had inside at the moment, I should have left that habit behind when I got my new credit card instead of letting it become the reason my bill is too high for me to pay off in one go.
I let my parents get too close to me when I was a little too old. I believe everything I think and feel in the present is a delayed response to the guilt which I would like to place the blame for causing on my parents. During my last few years living at home I was the sickest and thinnest I have ever been as an adult. I, proudly, weighed 110 pounds on my heaviest day. I got very sick for two months and refused to see a doctor (a pattern which I tended to repeat frequently); my leg got infected twice, my right breast then became dangerously infected for no reason; I got mono at a friend’s house from dirty dishes while also getting covid from a coworker at the same time; I had strep throat at some point (that’s what the doctor tells me); and then because most parents do not seem to believe in vaccinating their children, I got pneumonia over spring break which lasted three months total. I have also developed a new response to stress which is instant and crippling acid reflux, but that only happens now when I think about my parents or go over to their house.
When you close your eyes, what do you imagine you are doing to the places your feelings are kept?
I close my eyes and imagine that I am absolutely free, just like I used to be. I still cry—that’s built into me—but I cry for a short time and get over things easily. I throw objects like shirts and cups and silverware and blue fiesta bowls over the balcony railing because they don’t hold extra feelings well like the squishy parts in my chest do. In cathartic rage I watch everything crack and burn and rip below me. The squishy is either numb or happy. It’s nice that way. It is good to have the ability again to switch things on in my brain that say be happy! so I can put on a spectacular show for those around me who deserve to be happy!. It all ensures people still love me.
At the end of the day, my biggest priorities lie in stupid, useless pursuits that I will likely never achieve:
- Decorate my house to look like a Pinterest board so I don’t spend so much time running away from it,
- read more books and actually understand what they mean,
- become effortlessly cool so people I care about compliment me more instead of criticizing (this involves getting rid of my adult acne and biting my tongue more often),
- to be adored for the personality I have rather than one people perceive me to possess,
- get a sweatshirt that fits me like my boyfriend’s so he won’t take back the thing I sleep in and cry in and eat with and use to cover myself from the rain,
- find my be happy! abilities and use them daily so I no longer need to feel too deeply (to do: spend less time with nothing to do at all)