The emotional binary.

There are words stuck in my heart. That doesn't happen to me. I don't even believe in writer's block, thanks to a professor who probably doesn't know how much of an impact his dismissive attitude towards blocks had on me.

"Excuses," he used to say, "Even on their worst day a doctor can and must diagnose a patient, if you want the same respect as any other professional, respect your own profession first, and then even on your worst day, you should be able to spit out copy."

I see his point. I agree with him, to a large extent. It's not writer's block though, even on my worst day, I can spit out copy, but that is a function of skill, and blocks, they're often an emotional thing. The past few months I have focused on accepting my emotional self. It's not that I was previously unaware of it, nor really intolerant, it's that I have my emotions on a binary (and macro) scale. Good and bad. That is all I understand, but I always thought, it would change. I figured there was something I was missing, people around me seemed always upset on my behalf, offended on my behalf, angry on my behalf, jealous on my behalf, stressed on my behalf, but I could never give them the satisfaction of experiencing the emotion alongside them. I must admit, I have faked it. I never fake orgasms (unless you are paying me, but I actually think I have changed my principles on that as well), but I do act out emotion. I only do it when the people around me will be actively uncomfortable or inconvenienced if I don't absorb the emotion of the room or situation but I do it. The truth is that my emotional state doesn't actually change very frequently.

Good and bad aren't weather, they're climactic conditions, as far as my emotional state is concerned. For the last decade or so, it's good inside me for about 330-350 days a year and the rest are bad, they come like seasons and that is the seasonal structure. The thing is though, the only visible change in me and how I appear to be between good and bad, is my writing. I write differently when I am bad. More emotional, less controlled. Less structured, more frenzied. I don't act on emotion in my day-to-day life. I do what I know I am supposed to do because those decisions were made by the wisest, most trustable version of me. I don't govern myself on emotion, I govern myself based on plans made when I was sober, focused and thorough. That way, being sad doesn't mean I won't go for my run. Being happy doesn't mean I eat cake. Being angry doesn't mean I can yell at people. Being stressed doesn't mean I should drink and smoke. It hasn't actually ever occured to me to express my emotions this way, but the fact that I don't has been pointed out as odd many times. Enough times that I thought I may be missing something wrong in the way I emote.

You know, because, I figured perhaps I wasn't allowing myself emotion so that I would always be perfectly functional and reliable as an individual. That definitely was engrained in me. Or maybe that I was burying my emotions so as to not inconvenience anyone with that. They're good explanations but the problem is that I don't feel that way. I just don't know how to do it. I don't know how to make decisions based on what I feel. Even the smallest decision like: It's feel festive, let's eat cake. Things don't often occur to me like that. I could go to a doctor, get evaluated, and find out if there is an easier way for me to figure this out, but the truth is, I am quite content in life. In some way, I have always been. I don't feel like it adds to my life to experience and act out of hundreds of weather events every single day, I would rather have a plan in place to deal with an inevitable winter that may arrive from time to time. I always figured I would find the solution for my emotional structure, but seriously, I struggle to see the problem. And at some point, my pretence to a socially sanctioned normalcy started to feel tedious. Especially since, as I get older, I feel even less of a impulse to act emotionally. The two instances in the past two years when I felt genuine anger, still feel like dirt upon my heart. I don't know that I wish to change any of this about myself.

So I decided to just accept it as who I am.

It works fine, except for this block in my heart. This is new. This is caused by something I don't understand. I have always been a completely honest person, and I don't mean it in the "brutally honest but really an asshole way." It's not honesty to tell someone they have a weird nose, it's unnecessary adherence to a monolithic idea of beauty and perhaps even a deliberate attempt to hurt someone in order to elicit specific behaviour from them. That is not what I mean by honesty. I mean that I also share information without doing the emotional or social math on whether it *should* be shared. I feel impeded in that, in some ways. Part of that is because I have always used writing as a completely reflective literary mirror, but then I went and made a profession out of it, and while that didn't make me a worse writer, nor did it force me to be inauthentic (because it is better I never write again than I do so in imitation of an idea that isn't even me), but it did make it harder for me to think and represent as me instead of the characters, the situation, the point, the structure. Don't get me wrong, I love that, I have never found an activity, sex included, that I enjoy more than writing, but the impersonality with which I write, because that is just who I am as a writer, sometimes means that I, the writer, am not saying things that I, the person, needs to say.  

It's also, a bit, fraught? I don't want to be so revelatory as a person in spaces where I, in any way, work but because every place where I express, is also where I work, I am sometimes left saying a lot, but feeling alone.

That is really what the block is about.

It's a loneliness.  

But it is a loneliness that cannot be bridged. No human being can be close enough to me for me to no longer feel it. There is something deeply solitary about the process of creation and of obsessive self-reflection, it cannot be shared nor shown. No one in my life can reach in and touch it. Until I die, and beyond, only I will have known it. I am used to most of this loneliness, it doesn't make me sad, it doesn't make me anything at all, but when it is exacerbated by a condition placed on me by way of social relationships and emotional bonds, I don't know what to do with it.

There are words stuck in my heart.

They feel like my mother, from many years ago. There was a point when I was growing up when I stopped trying to help her and started mourning her instead. I can smell that feeling in my heart. It's as unsettling as anger. It hurts as it rests on my chest.

But it doesn't matter.

It shall pass without my action or intervention.

As far as the climatic conditions go, I am good.