Morning Mood

I woke up feeling a lot of grief this morning.

I felt a lot of grief last night, too. When I sat down to watch Inception, I was filled with tremendous emotion. An overpowering sadness. The movie did its job in distracting me for a while, but of course the feeling remained afterward.

Later I took a walk to a park near my house. I walk pretty briskly when I'm getting somewhere, but I decided to saunter kind of slowly once I hit the green. I decided to walk a slow loop and think about things. I crossed my arms. Slowly I began to notice how I was looking at things, how I was playing this subtle, subtle game with my feelings and surroundings, as if I'm making tiny, minute projections on to everything I see. Painting over the concrete and benches and trees with my feelings (baggage). And I noticed how I've done this before: this is a game I haven't played in, well, about 3 years.

I feel overwhelmed and disconcerted and a bit distressed right now, but at least it's clear that this is not new; this is something I have dealt with before. It's just a little discouraging to know that I've let myself slip back into this space.

What is it, exactly? On the surface it's the "pining for unrequited love" feeling. I can at least credit myself with understanding that it goes deeper than this; that if I frame it this way, "if only she loves me, all will be well," nothing will improve, I will only sink deeper. Of course, I am not going to all to arms right away. As is normal for me now, I simply watch passively when I start into destructive behavior. But I take it a few grains less seriously than I used to, which is good.

Deeper it's a lot of other things. Or maybe one big thing that I perceive as a many-armed monstrosity. It's the whole lack of faith in myself thing. Feeling incomplete, feeling like a piece of a person. Sometimes that is portrayed as being noble and romantic (as in the movie last night: "Do you know what it's like to be a lover? A half of a whole?"), but these days it seems parasitic to me.

It does, in fact, feel like an addiction.

I wish I could frame it accurately, so I can observe it properly. My sense right now is that it has to do with feelings as content, not just as a context. I get hooked on a feeling being around people. In this situation, there is a memory of a past feeling that was very solid, very good. I felt very empowered. Am I trying to return to that high? Have I defined this person as a "fix"? It seems so. It saddens me that this is how I am right now, but I need to observe it. Keep watching it. Remind myself that this is what I'm doing. Remind myself that as long as I keep framing it this way, that this is someone I need to be happy with myself, the worse it's going to get.

(Is that what being happy really means, being happy with yourself? Or at least, not hating yourself? Is that what everyone in this world, or at least this culture I find myself in, is after, and is so terrible at reaching?)

I need to end, but before I end I want to acknowledge that a lot of what I'm feeling right now has to be fall out from breaking up with Alexa. Unexpected desperation, grief, frustration, self-doubt, within weeks of an intense and distressing break-up, appearing at random? Of course not. This is emotion I need to feel right now. The timing is just a little late. The way it seems to be emerging objectively doesn't entirely match up, but I don't think this really matters. It's natural and normal and necessary. One way to look at it is that I am, in fact, reacting to the situation right now in some way, but this recent break-up stuff, and all the attached deep, dark primitive stuff that it brings with it, has commandeered this relatively smaller thing.

Anyway, it's not hopeless; I know what to do; I can look at this for what it is.