I've recently been trying to figure out how to unlock my emotions. I don't know if it's just normal depression that has muted my feelings, or if it's a subconscious choice to dive into escapism or aversion. Either way the end result has me tuning out of most emotions because I find them overwhelming. I've been using the metaphor of a slipgate, and while I can try to turn the flow on or off, it comes as one large surge.
Which would be fine, if I could tolerate the water, but seeing as how almost everything I feel is related to how awful literally everything is in the world right now, it feels very difficult to try and stomach that taste. Maybe if I could isolate myself away from all the awful shit going politically, environmentally, socially, economically, literally almost anything about my outside world and focus on just the fine minutia of my daily life I might be able to tolerate my emotions. But as is, it's a few strands of happiness amidst an entire ocean's worth of negativity, anxiety, hopelessness, anger..seething apoplectic anger, sadness, and just more hopelessness. There's just soooo much of that awful brew that it outweighs any positive emotions I may be feeling at the same time.
Now I will add some caveats. I'm not married to the idea that it's all or nothing, or that its a binary of on or off emotions. I'm also not super set on being turned off to everything, because It has also locked up a lot of my desires to be intimate or sexual with anyone as well. Although, that may be an aversion to something else.
But the main gripe, is that to avoid all those awful emotions, I've locked away most everything that I feel. Most of my daily life I feel sorta empty. A numb contemptuous passive witness to my life. My instinctive Id-like mind doing all of the work, while any higher level emotions are just ..gone. The emotions are still there, but it's just the name tags. All of the substance and mass of them are locked away.
I don't want to risk dealing with those emotions, they are incredibly intense, and overwhelming, and avoiding them is easier and allows me to function on a realistic level. In that same vein, I need to come to grips with some very heavy sexual emotions that I've also been avoiding. One being the potential ongoing truama that is my sex life, that is coming to terms with what sex is now, and accepting it for where it is, and how it isn't what I thought it would as a little girl. All my life I've wanted to have sex as a woman, and while I now have as close an approximation as I can get, it isn't what I dreamed it would be. How could it have been? Nothing in the world would have lived up to those expectations. Still the disappointment in that is very, very real and very painful to experience. That isn't to say it can't or won't be enjoyable, or that I've even begun to learn how to have sex as a woman, or what the best and most enjoyable sex is for me. But the aversion comes from now wanting to risk that disappointment again.
After all, I can't be disappointed in the sex if I don't have the sex to begin with. That's the kind of sick, high brown mental gymnastics I've twisted myself into to avoid that emotional pain. In order to avoid that risk, I've locked away my sexuality as well, much to the detriment of my relationship, and any other potential relationship. Oh but we can go deeper. Buried in that fear of disappointment is also the fear that as I have more sex, that it will never be fulfilling or engaging or enjoyable, and that I'll come to regret my surgery, because you know, I don't have enough fucking weight put on my ability to enjoy sex from myself, I need to add the weight of becoming one of those people that neo-nazi's use to argue against my own fucking rights.
So, you can see how it just becomes so much easier to let all that shit go and just be asexual. Just don't think about anything, just leave all my cares and emotions behind to where nothing matters and I can just exist on some functional level. Everything else is just too much to risk.
Anyway, happy fucking birthday to me, guess I need to visit a claims adjuster.
