When I was 20 years old, I left my miserable and depressing sentence on Long Island and embarked upon a whole new life in a far away place with new people. In no time, I was dating, I had a gang of new and terribly interesting friends and, for the first time, I was completely in charge of the timbre and mood around me. In short, this life bore no resemblance to the life I left.
Well, almost.
I did manage to find space to carry twenty years of trauma, maladaptive character traits and confusion with me. Just the other day, I thought about the phrase “don’t take it out on everyone else. This was a colloquialism that I heard my mother say to my father more than his name. I just assumed it was a common behavior.Now, I finally realize it’s not. As a matter of fact, I have never been reprimanded by anyone for “taking things out” on anyone else. The idea of infecting an innocent bystander with whatever discomfort or hardship I was experiencing seemed abusive—or at the very least, unfair.
That’s just scratching the surface, though. Some of the most uncomfortable moments that I experienced after I came to New Paltz were when the people around, most of whom enjoyed healthier upbringings, would “put me in my place.” That meant they were going to explain to me, usually in an exasperated way, that I was very self-centered and never considered how my actions affected other people.
Thinking back on it, this was how I rolled off the assembly line. I’m not sure if I picked it up from observing my parents throughout my childhood or developed as a skill in the face of that kind of parenting, but it was there in a very big way. As I aged, I systematically had to reprogram everything I learned in my formative years. It was a lot to deal with.
I think one of my biggest hurdles that I still face is how disassociated from my own feelings I am. If I have ever been able to convey emotion with my music or writing, you can bet it took a long time to figure out and process. Generally, my immediate response to uncomfortable feelings is to be distanced. It was like I had one of those cartoon balloons over my head with no words in it—just a smudge of ink. The way Charles M Schultz would do to illustrate that the character was enveloped in nebulous negativity.
Now, obviously, people who disassociate from their feelings aren’t really aware that they do it. The way I finally realized it was unique, to say the least. You could say it came to me as an epiphany.
My first girlfriend at New Paltz had more issues than me, if you can believe it. If memory serves, she struggled with bipolarity and she had a tendency to become histrionic without warning. One night, we were joking around in bed and she said my color looked terrible and I should get checked out. Well, I think I pretended to have a heart attack. Oh my Jesus, the way she reacted would only have been appropriate if I held her out a 22 story window with one hand and rolled a cigarette with the other.
As you might have guessed, I didn’t know what to think besides feeling anger at something. That’s more or less my default setting in uncomfortable situations. I walked out of the room to use the bathroom, and in my head I heard, “What do I gotta do to make you love me…” Try to imagine that then, in 1990, I hadn’t heard an Elton John track since I was 8 or 9 years old, and I was confused why I had this corny song in my head. I stood there and followed the lyrics right to the chorus, “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word.”
I was completely shocked. I realized immediately that although I was separated from my emotional responses, I was experiencing remorse. Not only that, the feelings were buried so deep, I needed these lyrics to point it out to me. Then, a few months later, I realized another obscure song came into my head out of the clear blue and it, too, pointed me toward what I was feeling. Again, it took a little time to accept that there was a whole universe happening inside of me that I was not consciously aware of, but as long as I paid attention to whatever song popped in my head, the answer would always be in the lyric.
I called it my emotional jukebox, but what it really was was a sort of compass to myself. I could never articulate any of this before, it was just something I was aware of in a cursory way. After two years with my magical therapist, I have been able to comprehend myself in a much more meaningful way. There are times I become overwhelmed when I think about how muted my emotional responses are. It seems like I am either loving life or I am angry. Two settings. But as I said, everything began as anger but underneath it was a lot of complicated shit.
I have read that the brain’s most important function is to delete information, not collect it. In other words, if you stood in your living room for ten minutes with your brain processing every little thing that was happening, you’d go mad. The sound of the water heater turning on. The sound the dog is making. A fly on the curtain.The cars on the street. Instead, the brain gets rid of all the inconsequential stuff and allows you to focus only on what will keep you alive.
My brain provides me the jukebox function because a person can not survive being so distanced from what they are experiencing emotionally. It is to my self actualization what a slim jim is to a dude who locked his keys in his car. More interesting, though. Have you ever seen what a slim jim looks like?
Good one Billy. Now I will be processing every sound, sight and thought for days. I should journal it all! Thanks, until next weekend...