“Psychorepression” and the empathic civilization.

         

            I want to stay up all night long entertaining myself with my own thoughts. I might do it tonight. I want my creativity to extend farther than I ever dreamt possible. I want to roll around in my bed laughing because of how amazing my life is. I want to feel stronger with less. I want to stop thinking about what I want and enjoy what I have. I want to experience my emotions without trying to control them.  There are certain things that make us human and tonight I’ve experienced a few.  My heart broke several times in the past few hours.  My heart broke for Emily who said goodbye to two of her very closest friends for what might be forever.  My heart broke when Priyam came over because I love her so much and I know that someday she won’t be just a stone’s throw away.  My heart broke because I realized how much I miss Thaddaeus and it made me sad to think of how many new things we could be experiencing together every day.  Lastly, my heart broke because some dear friends found me in my room and wiped tears off of my face until my heart broke again. Now, I know what you’re thinking, you think my heart is weak.  You think I’m a girl (I am).  While these are all valid assumptions, I must inform you that they don’t tell the whole story.  

            My heart is in top form.  My heart could run a full marathon tonight and come home in the morning ready to down some protein powder and immediately do another round of cardio.  My heart will kick your butt.  Seriously.  My heart is learning new karate blocks every single day.  This is because I am lucky enough to live in a house where emotions are embraced and hearts are broken for reasons that make our world a better place.  Here, in the warm embrace of Dennis Quaid, an emphasis is placed on feeling and not brain function.

            I read a short story last week on the airplane about how we should try less to understand the inner workings of our brains and thought. Our brain does something foreign and we flee; we literally grab our keys and wallet and run out the door to the psychiatrist who, "may prescribe psychiatric medication, conduct physical examinations, order and interpret laboratory tests and electroencephalograms, and may order brain imaging studies such as computed tomography or computed axial tomography (CT/CAT Scan), magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission tomography scanning."  Yeah, I got that from Wikipedia.  But it makes a really good point.  My brain, for example, doesn’t like 50% of the words included in that quote, at all.  It passes over them extremely quickly to arrive at “order” and “may” which are a bit more comfortable to me and don’t make me wonder why my brain hurts.  Did my brain go into a state of panic and confusion upon seeing words like “electroencephalogram” and “positron emission tomography”?  Did my unhappy-neurons fire to warn my brain that I was being exposed to concepts that were intended to make me understand something that might be better left alone? Did these words inspire me to run around my house asking people why I didn’t understand these words and what they meant and to help me analyze how they make me feel and whether or not I might be a prime candidate for these types of therapies????  No, but they certainly could have!  For this reason, Lewis Thomas proposes a call to arms; BRING BACK THE ATTIC! He suggests the we reinstate the attic of the brain; remove the step ladder, close the trap door, turn off the nosy flashlight that scans that dark space, and calm down.  I will quote Thomas’ intended purpose for this suggestion:

“We might, in this way, regain the kind of spontaneity and zest for ideas,

 things popping into the mind, uncontrollable and ungovernable thoughts, the feel that

 this notion is somehow connected unaccountably with that one. We could come again into 

possession of real memory, the kind of memory that can come only from jumbled 

forgotten furniture, old photographs, fragments of music.”

Does that make sense? Who cares. At least one of your neurons probably fired and maybe another one will again someday soon. For now, I just want to feel things. I don’t need to know why. I won’t get this day back and I certainly don’t want to spend it obsessing about why I can’t put myself into another state of mind that I'm equally confused by.

Duh.