Month: August 2019

Shields Up!

chasingpma

As a young kid I was an emotional rollercoaster. All thin skin and raw nerves. Everything I felt hit hard. It was exhausting dealing with it personally and I can only imagine just as exhausting for the people around me. At some point I got control of my emotions, and then just started shutting them out.

I didn’t like feeling vulnerable so the obvious solution was to wrap myself in layers of aloofness and sarcasm. Simple. Effective. Wrong.

I carried on like that for a long time, keeping all but a very few at arms length at all times. Eventually it was as much of an image I was maintaining as it was a defense mechanism. On the surface I was laid back, chill, unbothered. Behind that mask I was terrified of actual emotional investment. In anyone or anything.

Shields, however, work both ways. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Even when good things came my way I couldn’t properly accept or reciprocate. Even, often especially, the things I wanted most eventually fell away because I was more invested in protecting myself. Keeping those shields up became a self fulfilling prophecy. I ended up hurting far worse and putting more and more strength behind those damned shields.

I’m still unpacking a lot of the damage I did to myself over those years. Eventually I started peeling away the layers and found the thin skin and raw nerves of my youth exposed again. I’ve certainly felt the sting of pain and loss more acutely than before, but I’ve also experienced far deeper levels of joy and amusement. The news sucks most days, but there are always cute cat videos.

The vulnerability that once terrified me is refreshing now. Where I once had the emotional depth of a paper plate, I’m closer everyday to being a big salad bowl of all the flavors of the human experience. Time to dig in!

Let’s Talk About Anger!

chasingpma

Let’s talk about anger!

That’s a pretty easy place to start, right? It’s a base, primal emotion. An emotion that men are basically encouraged to express. We’re taught that it can be focused and harnesed to achieve our goals. That’s even true to an extent. Personally when something in my personal life has irked me I can channel that frustration into my workouts. There’s a certain boost there, a competetive edge in that extra pump of blood anger delivers. Even art often finds inspiration in anger. Most of the bands on my gym playlist have turned their own anger into powerful and inspiring music. Heavy music and heavy weights generally improve any day.

All that said it feels like we often filter too many of our emotional experiences through anger. It’s become a default emotion when we don’t know how else to express ourselves. Think about the last three times you were angry about something. Were you truly angry, or was it just easier to process through anger?

Were you really angry with a friend, or just disappointed in their actions?

Were you really angry at the driver that cut you off, or just anxious that they nearly caused a wreck?

Were you really angry at your ex, or just sad that the relationship ended?

There’s no wrong answer here. The beauty of human emotion is that we can experience more than one at a time. They can, and should, coexist. The trick is not to just focus everything into the easiest one. Anger is easy and addictive. It becomes a drug, and like any drug you need higher and higher doses to get the same high. Eventually everything becomes an excuse to rage on anyone or anything in your path. In the past I found myself actively seeking situations that I knew would upset me, just as an excuse to be angry. In reality though, I was just looking for an excuse to emote. I was using anger as a way to express a range of other emotions I had been bottling up. I didn’t want to be angry, I just wanted to allow myself the freedom to feel something.

I can’t tell you how to feel feelings. Legally, I can’t. I don’t have a fancy degree or a license for that sort of thing. What I am is a dude with a laptop who’s been through some shit and finally figured out it’s a lot easier to deal with it if you actually open up instead of just screaming obscenities into the void while you’re stuck in traffic. If you can break that addiction, that knee jerk reaction to jump to anger you open yourself up to so much more. Once you dothat you can really start to experience Positive Masculine Achievement!