Night Thoughts

I lay awake this morning until nearly 4am until exhaustion pushed me down into unconsciousness. I woke up with little sleep under my belt and a sense of a descending inner coldness that is not characteristic for me, yet coming more and more frequently. You see, I used to be the kind of person who was full of exuberance, playfulness, and very intense emotions, many of which I broadcast to the world without the slightest hesitation or care. I could be extremely joyful, just as prone to dancing along the sidewalk and running down the street as I was to merely walking down it, and took great pleasure in playing in the world around me, running and jumping my way through life. One of my friends from oh-so-many-years-ago used to say that I was much like a Muppet on speed, though apparently in a good way. Thinking back on it, I suppose that I was.

Yet somehow when I've tried to pull that playfulness back up again recently, I seem completely unable to find it. The ability to tap into the intensity of my emotions has been lost to me. I've laid awake, struggling to figure out what happened. Without my noticing over the years, the pressure from the people closest to me has successfully snuffed much of the outward emotion that I used to exude, people whose only visible change of emotion or outward expression of feeling is whether they're smiling or not, who never dare to raise their voices, who are rarely (if ever) heard to utter a superlative, whose reaction to even the slightest rising enthusiasm in me has been to either tell me that I don't have to get upset (that even includes getting excited or verbally enthusiastic about something I'm actually happy about) or to subtly shut me out by looking away from or turning away from me the moment that I get the least bit expressive. Years of subtle pressure and conditioning have bottled up the part of me that I most treasured, the core of what makes me who I really am.

Or at least who I really was. My oldest friend said with a smile on her face that these people's influence "tempers" me. Well, pardon me that I neither wanted this part of who I am to be tempered, nor thought it needed to be. It's the part of life that I took the greatest amount of pleasure in, the ability to play and be outwardly joyful and expressive.

It can't all be lost, though. This part of me surfaced some when I was around Sasha because he's enthusiastic and playful, but my happiness to be around someone who was comfortable with it and who welcomed it without judgement was met with coldness and suspicion at home. And then I went to Alabama and that part of me started to bubble up to the surface again. The happiness, the sheer playfulness that I felt while I was there, the overwhelming love for climbing that I felt, the surges of wonder and joy that kept me on high for the first two days that I was there were loosening the feeling of the iron band around my chest. I started to become enthusiastic, to want to run through the place like a child in a playground and to share in the enthusiasm of the people whom I was with. It was like I felt a surge of ecstasy that was so familiar, a surge of contentment and peace that I hadn't felt in so long that I wanted to curl up in it and float away. I was riding on a climbing high like one that I hadn't been on in over a decade.

I called home to share my enthusiasm, to tell all about the beauty and wonder of the place where we were and how excited I was about climbing again and how he would love it there, but my enthusiasm was crushed with a glacial reception and a few well aimed, barbed comments that brought my spirit plummeting to the ground. Exuberance effectively crushed once again. I headed to the showers to try to wash the phone call off of me. After that, I wandered off into the boulder field alone to try to shake it off. I called home to try to straighten things out, but with only partial success, though I was able to get past it enough to join my friends again that evening without bringing them down. After that, I did manage to have a good time for the rest of the trip, but I never saw that old part of me again.

A friend and I have been discussing emotional intensity in general and I've come to realize that I'm at great risk of losing a huge part of me, perhaps forever. Like last night, I've laid awake thinking about it. I woke up this morning realizing that the part of me that I most treasured, the biggest part of what makes me who I am, has been pushed so far down that I've struggled and I've fought time and time again to get a hold of it again, but it's so deeply buried that I'm not sure if I can actually pull it out. I wonder how much longer that part of me can remain buried before it dies forever. And despite the tightening in my throat that was making it hard for me to swallow, I cried exactly five tears, then could let out no more. There. Done.