Subdued Intrinsic

Personal Note: In Golden I compare kissing Ian to the kind of fire that starts with frost, the kind of cold so deep it burns. If you want an idea of what I mean, buy yourself some True Shimmer Peppermint Rush ChapStick and put it on thick. It’s like IcyHot for your lips.

"Love hurts.

But sometimes it's a good hurt,

And I feel like I'm alive.

Love sings,

When it transcends the bad things.

Have a heart, and try me,

Because without love, I won't survive."

--"Love Hurts", by Incubus

I’m a lot of things I don’t like, but the largest of them is ‘chemically unbalanced’. In other words, sometimes the science project that is my brain goes a little askew and suddenly I’m not in control of myself, not really. This often correlates with my body doing various (not just the main one) things boy bodies don’t do. The last twenty-four hours have been bad. I never even saw it coming. One second I was fine, but the next I was suddenly so angry I picked up a figurine angel and flung it onto the ground to break into a hundred pieces. Then I ripped her thin bronze wings off because it wasn’t right for an angel to be that broken. An hour later I was so paralyzed with fear I couldn’t stop staring at a patch of carpet because that was the only way I knew how to keep myself from crumbling into as many pieces as the angel. I didn’t move a centimeter for thirty minutes. When my husband asked me a question, it took me five minutes and a dozen gaped-mouthed tries to to answer him. I was simply too scared to open my lips and wrap my tongue around the words.

Today wasn’t much better. I cried (I’ve perfected the silent sob, thank you) through several bits of church because I was too sad about nothing in particular. The part where I feel like I have the flu is coming. My throat is already scratchy, and I’m exhausted.

It got me thinking; how many other writers have something similar going on with them? They say creative, artistic, dreamer people are more prone to depression, rage, anxiety, etc. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure why my husband, the Vulcan, thinks of feelings the same way he thinks of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy; they’re there, but it’s your choice whether or not you let them effect your actions. To me, what I feel is just as real, just as physical as a brick wall too tall and too wide to get beyond. The concept of reacting to your feelings is so alien to me I can’t even explain it. Is that why ‘creative’ types suffer from depression more (as they say), because maybe we believe in feelings more strongly? Is it God’s way of balancing us out? We’re strong in our imaginations, but fragile in our hearts? Or at least the parts of our heart connected to our heads? Do we FEEL harder than our more logical counterparts? Or are we just not as strong as them?

In the Nicolas Cage movie, City of Angels, the angel “Seth” asks his human love interest, a pretty doctor named Maggie, what happens when people cry. She gives him some medical rigamarole, but then he answers her, “Maybe... maybe emotion becomes so intense your body just can't contain it. Your mind and your feelings become too powerful... and your body weeps.”

Maybe emotions are more real for some people, more forceful. It’s not that they’re more important than the emotions of others, but more that some people were made to feel them in bigger quantities, but in the end we’re still only human . . . and so our bodies weep.