Break the bonds of servitude to thyself

Emotion, it’s capable of giving us the strongest senses of happiness, or the most overwhelming depths of sadness and despair. Most of us spend a lifetime trying to control the emotions that drive us, reeling in our anger, or discarding our fears as irrational responses to things, but for some we reach a point of being so in control of our emotions that we lose touch with the very thing that makes us human.

Driven, soulless and incapable of feeling anything even on superficial levels we regard all life with a passing fascination but no appreciation. On the other hand we allow certain emotions to overwhelm us for a myriad of reasons and the impetus’ that are responsible become either infamous or glorified for what they do. Depraved venerations for things so sick or vile that the mind reels at how such a travesty can exist.

But it is a sick world we live in, home to things and people, actions and ideas that can lift or compel us to the highest levels of achievement or bring us to the darkest reaches of the abyss we all hide from within ourselves.  The most jaded among us seem immune to the agony of having our dreams crushed, but then there are those who cling to the innocence of naivety and, either by choice or inability to see anything else, continue to see the world with eyes that color it as something wondrous and beautiful. It is those poor ignorant souls that find enjoyment, contentment, and revel in happiness afforded to only a select few. For far too long, so many of us have toiled in jobs we are unsatisfied with, relationships that have long ago grown stale or unfulfilling, friends that no longer complement us as people and do nothing to help us grow, familial ties that we maintain out of some warped ideation of duty or honor, and lives that hold no sense of intrinsic value.

We wear plastic smiles, sport clothes we dislike, say things we don’t believe or understand, drink or eat things from places we have no stake in, and stare down the barrel of immeasurable scrutiny should we cast off any of these behaviors, and all because group thinking dictates that all of this is good. We start out life as blank slates, clean and pure of all sin and taint but as we grow up and collect one experience after another, the instinct for acceptance coupled with the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure demands that we mold and adapt to what others ask of us, and before we know it, a single compromise has become millions, a mild conceit has degenerated into countless vices, and when we look in the mirror we have no true sense of who stares back at us behind the eyes we see.

They say that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. There’s a measure of skill involved in being able to reading someone’s eyes, to look at a person and see the who they really are. A good sales person can read body language without realizing they are doing it, but someone who can read the eyes knows so much more than what someone will buy. They know hopes, dreams, wants, misery, discontent, joy, happiness, fear, trepidation, passion, remorse, and a slew of other things, but too often lately my penchant for reading people has left me disheartened and disenfranchised with the human race. I look at the people around me, the people I’ve known for years, and I see dying fires of passion. Somehow these people who’ve not necessarily had great lives, but most of them having lived in far better times than I, have become withered soulless husks of what they were. I look at the people, these individuals that I’ve bestowed the title of “Friend” upon, and from their actions, their words, their behavior, and behind their eyes, I see people too consumed by a world that cares nothing for them, too crippled by their petty unfounded fears to connect or relate, and I feel a great deal of sadness for what our world has become.

Someone I held very close once told me that the best thing about me is also the worst. I have an unrivaled passion and that passion is overwhelming to others. But to see so many who have not just less passion, but more often than not, no passion at all is depressing. People so afraid of their emotions, of the things that drive them, compel them, touch them, the very things that remind them they’re alive exist as affront to everything we have the potential to be. A woman trapped in a relationship she’s too afraid to leave, too apprehensive to commit herself to emotionally, indulges in one sacrement after another to convince herself she's happy and committed. But her quiet discord causes her to reach out to someone else, rationalized as nothing more than an attempt to feel alive and contented, she accidentally produces an emotional attachment. The fear of having to admit not only to everyone else but mainly to herself that the relationship she’s in publicly is crafted on empty sentiment becomes so debilitating that she tries to turn off everything she’s feeling and move blindly through life, hoping to never have to face the demons she’s created by living the lie. But try as she might, she remains inexorably bound to the only man she’s ever known capable of touching her heart and her sol (not a typo).

A woman having made the investment in a relationship of everything she has to give, unwaveringly loyal to her love. The impetus for this behavior and blind allegiance stemming from a previous act of betrayal that she works feverishly to atone for and in so doing she trivializes an unexpected dynamic she inadvertently cultivates with someone besides her lover and the connection she shares with this person she sees as dirty, dark, and shameful choosing to ignore the emotions, to refuse acknowledgement in any form of the emotions she feels all in the hope that it will go away. Espousing hopes of platonic contact but each attempt is made little more than drivel and Again she remains a slave to the emotions she believes herself to be in control of.

A woman who finds happiness for the first time in her life and in that moment sees the world for something other the bleak and dreary existence that has encased her for so long in recent memory. It begins as nothing more than mindless rutting, two bodies conjoined at the hips in hopes of finding the next plateau of pleasure and release. Slowly it changes, a fluid dynamic made solid and volatile by the introduction of something too powerful to control, love. A silent acknowledgement made for what she feels, a verbal expression with wanton hope and anxiety behind every word, and the response that is all too devastating to keep her eyes dry. But she tries to remain strong, holding to hope as her life raft, making every second count toward the day when those feelings would be reciprocated. And then the silent death knell of finality as those hope are choked away, but a strong spirit is not so easily killed and love doesn’t die, it consumes and controls, it makes slaves of us all.

A man, too far jaded and embittered with a lifetime or torment, anguish, disappointment, and the burden of having grown up too fast, finds miring in silent pursuits of pure intellect to be the only thing close to fulfilling. Isolated from everyone and everything, he finds emotional solitude to be in his best interest and seeks virtually nothing in the way of connection or attachment. Lost in his thoughts, blinded by the persona he portrays to the world as a means of guarding against the scars that run far too deep, he awakes one day to find that his single minded endeavors have landed him in a position where a bold new world stretches out into the infinite before him. But he tries at first to control the emotions he’s still attempting to identify and process, his entire being having been awoken with the touch of this new creature, this angelic being that suspends a halo with horns. Choosing to embrace the emotions, to revel in them, to experience everything they offer, he foolishly makes decisions that will haunt him long after the glow of the halo has faded. For far too long, immutable misery is colored as just suffering for unrivalled happiness, the textbook mindset of the insane. For every deplorable action there is a logical explanation that requires not so much a leap of logic but a level of analysis that would seem to imply that this man knows more of the woman to whom he’s attached that she knows of herself. The sad part is that it might be true. But he suffers unimaginably, toiling in an agony that can only be described as making hell seem like heaven, and all because the emotions he once pushed away, once ignored and controlled, have returned. Ignited by a passionate fire that burns more brightly and powerfully than the sun, those passions overwhelm and consume him, exerting an inescapable control that refuses to let go and only tightens it’s grip the more ferociously he fights to escape it. He is made a willing slave to his own feelings, forced to balance his love for a woman too confounded by her own emotions to think clearly, and the man’s own ideations of love and affection.

We are all at the whim and mercy of our emotional selves, unable to break loose, get free, or even act outside of our sentimental natures. We fight too savagely to control what we feel and end up being slain by the feelings we combat. None of us is truly ever in command, ever able to truly let go, to escape the haunting feelings that linger long after the apex of tangibility for our emotions has gone. But our ham handed machinations to subdue those ghastly reminders of things felt before, lead us to addiction, to alcohol, to perversions of atonement, to rationalizations too weak to hold up under analysis, and to unyielding subjugation to the part of us that remains unwilling to forget.  To all of you, I posit this challenge; take control of your emotions by being honest about what they are and why you struggle so fiercely to contain them. Catharsis is only an admission away.