done gone crazy

I'm coming to the realization that I don't always give adequate.... feedback. There's a reason for this. I'm not so good at the open book thing. I'll admit it, I don't like feeling vulnerable. It's scary. More and more I'm finding that people don't know where they stand with me. "What do you think?" is an easy enuff question for me to answer... but I always get tripped up with the "How do you FEEL?" stuff.

What I THINK is usually pretty simple to explain. Cerebral. Definitive. Hell, I can walk you through the process. "Well, first I thought... which led me to wonder.... and THEN I thought.... So yeah... I think... blabbity blah." Easy peezy, shampoo squeezy.

But then... there's the feeeeeeeeling questions. Yeech. How do I FEEL??? Geebus. I dunno. Good? Bad? Can I be a teensy bit more descriptive? No I can't. Cuz ya wanna know why? Most of the time, I don't really know. I mean, I know at the MOMENT. Knee jerk stuff. Instantaneous response. I can express that... sure. But the thing is... after a little time has passed, my brain kicks in and the FEELING turns into THINKING.

The waters get all muddy after that. Logic and rationality somehow override emotion. I can no longer express how I FEEL about anything at that point... It all just turns into what I THINK... or however I've managed to make sense of what I felt.

Ridiculous right? Where's the humanity in this? It's completely fucking robotic. Input data... process... tabulate... compute... output response. Neatly itemized and alphabetized for your convenience. But it's cold. Sterile. Ick. And it drives me crazy to look at myself in those terms. And yet... it still fits.

I never used to be like this. At least I don't think I was. And I wonder now if this isn't just a lovely little by-product of feeling too much pain for too long. I think I needed a way to cope so I began to distance myself from things that were upsetting. I rationalized things that otherwise would have produced such a guttural response that they'd have been unbearable. Eventually, this distancing started to happen more often... until I'd effectively removed myself from all kinds of situations that forced me to FEEL, even those that used to be pleasant.

It's confusing as hell now... when I try to understand why I feel the need to be so guarded, even when I know it should be safe to start to explore something a little deeper than what I'm THINKING at any given moment... somehow I just can't.

Apparently, I am in an emotional prison of my own making. Godammit.
Aren't life's little epiphanies grand?
Fuck.