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@Triquetrea

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@chagmed

Whatever you feel like sharing would be appreciated.

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I feel like sharing everything, but I've felt greatly inhibited in my writing after I tried to go back to it and it got caught up in... ... well, got caught up in the stuff you're asking about, actually. Let's see.

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First, let's note that I used to be very emotionally inhibited. My mother was abused as a child, and my father most likely has undiagnosed Asperger's. They're both good people, and did their best raising me, but the emotional side was often compromised in very damaging ways.

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I've always been quick to anger, but for years I just... wouldn't get angry. People are often accused of throwing up anger to disguise fear, but for me it was the opposite: I'd get scared to avoid getting angry. Anger got me into bad situations at home.

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After my real awakenings started, I suddenly started feeling angry again. It would just appear, like lightning. A woman once told me the story of how as a child, she was taught not to cry. When in her teens she learned it was OK, at first she'd cry all the time. This? Like that.

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Then it turned out because I was avoiding anger, I was also avoiding a whole cluster of other feelings that would provoke anger. Sad because I felt like someone had let me down? Numb that. Frightened because I was asked to clean up someone else's mess? Avoid.

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I don't know if you do any fishing. I used to do that as a kid. If you get the hook tangled, say in some reeds, sometimes it just disappears. Other times, you have to struggle endlessly until eventually, the entire damned cluster of shit emerges from the water. This? Like that.

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Just tiny things, reminders of past indignities, would trigger all sorts of weird, embodied feelings. Stuff I'd only realize was there when something mildly ticked me off. And then the whole tangle would emerge from the water, soggy and dripping brackish water onto everything.

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So things have been very rocky for a while, but the damnedest thing has happened: I hold back less and less, all the time. I've got a range of emotional expression now, that I don't think I've ever had before. And I have fewer and fewer anxious holding patterns as time goes on.

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Sometimes a wound will open up when I realize something I'm doing is unnecessary, or otherwise unmerited, and I'll plunge into temporary despair. But then it's *been felt*, and it slowly just stops mattering altogether. When that happens, it's feels like my entire body lightens.

9:32 AM · Sep 26, 2018Twitter Web Client

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My Twitter persona, for example, would keep changing - and I realized it was a function of anxiety surrounding certain people I'd talk to here. So I divided them in two: people I'd no longer interact with, and people I'd change my interactions with to something that felt better.

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Stuff like this happens -all the time- now. I'll have feelings that are almost unbearably intense, but then when they are simply felt, they decamp and take entire problem areas with them.

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