Pinpointing emotions has always been my (shamelessly self-proclaimed) forte. It’s what keeps me sane as I am able to make reasonable and mostly accurate deductions about what I am feeling about a particular situation at a specific moment. It allows me to recognise what I am actually experiencing and subsequently provides reasoning pathways for me to figure out how I should respond to the current situation and how it has affected me.
Unfortunately, my pinpointing skills have failed me in recent weeks. My emotions were reduced to murky waters that couldn’t be filtered into its basic constituents. As a result, I resorted to the good old-fashioned way of trial and error; am I feeling Emotion A? Or Emotion B? What about Emotion C? Anger rarely reared its ugly head in any of my possible choices, so when I started feeling angry at a certain situation lately, I got angrier at myself for being angry. I was terrified of being angry; feeling sad felt better than being angry. But at the same time, anger didn’t feel like the right emotion, either. I was/am not dealing with [situation] the way it should be dealt with. And sometimes, none of [situations] were situations that could be dealt with, which made things even more frustrating. I was feeling, but for all the wrong reasons. I don’t know how to explain this. But a lot of things just felt wrong most of the time.
The only thing distracting me from this myriad of conflicting emotions was planning. It gives me something to look forward to, and it feels great staying up to execute [plans]. It also gives me a sense of control over what I can or cannot do, unlike the feeble control I have over my own emotions, so weak that I can’t even understand what I’m feeling and/or how I’m responding to it.
I guess most of the anger and frustration is directed towards myself for not being able to feel entirely happy and worry/fear-less whenever I spend time with people. It doesn’t make sense that I would feel this way with people that I am comfortable with, which makes the frustration even more intense. How can something that is so easy and effortless for other people (and even past-me) be such a huge fear boulder weighing me down? What have I been doing wrong all this time?
My last A2 paper ended today and like the last day of all exams I’ve ever sat for, it was kinda anti-climactic in contrast to all the hoo-haa of anticipating the end of exams.
I’m just trying not to think about like, people leaving and leaving people and leaving this place and leaving this goddamn town that I’ve grown so accustomed to and just leaving. All the farewells in my life have never prepared me enough for this one.
michelle teoh 