15 march 2011.

haley said to me a long time ago about starting to write again, because i told her about a condition i once had, and because it has returned with a violent vengeance, i will write about it.

1) i, in no way, intend to announce this on the loud speaker. please don't think that i am writing this to get attention/sympathy...
2) i have a problem. i'm not sure if it's medical. i doubt it though. but i have a problem with my emotions, and i just gotta say this, hoping someone somewhere out there is going to read it, or else no one will ever know.

i think i have a lot of emotions. i'm a freaking crybaby. i may or may not have as many emotions as you do, but while i have a lot of these feelings, everyone always sees my huge, big-teeth-buck-toothed smile that i involuntarily keep wide open nearly all the time. my mouth just goes that way. i have a smiley mouth.

that doesn't mean i'm not happy. Lord knows, i laugh at stuff i shouldn't be. just that, when i get an emotion that is not happy, i reflexively close it, bottle it, hope no one saw that i wasn't happy. and now i bring out the honesty: i have no idea how it came to be like this.

in the words of copeland, "everybody knows that you'd break your neck to keep your chin up."

for sure, i hate feeling anything other than happy. it makes me uncomfortable for 1) people to see me other than happy and 2) to talk about my emotions in case someone asked me if something was wrong. if you ask me, i will always say everything is okay, because the trouble and the discomfort of going through why i feel this way, yadda yadda, is...i don't value it as enough for something worth your time.

my emotions really are trivial in the grand scheme of things, and even if i did talk about my emotions to somebody, it never comes out the way it really is. and therefore, i don't talk about them. i can't talk about me, my life, exciting things that happened in my day, or how i felt about something. it takes a lot of energy to tell someone, "hey, guess what? i'm working on a piano/flute cover for the song 'stay'." (really, because i consider it selfish to talk about myself for some reason, though i love to hear people talk about their own lives.)

i've been trying to get rid of this. i'm not sure if this is considered alexithymia. but i have something, i think. i've tried to get rid of this once or twice before, and it went away. but it came back. and while i've attempted to destroy it, i can't. and so i talked to a therapist.

his name is gabe. he is in eleventh grade. he loves Jesus and loves people more than anyone else that i know. i figured he would be the best person to talk about it to, because i'm not particularly close to him (though i would like to be), meaning he doesn't know me inside and out enough to accuse me for wanting attention with this emotion problem thing; and God drew me to him. kinda cute.

and i will finally admit this to the world, because this, i think, is what it is all about: i was supremely hurt when i realized that i have a friend who is infinitely times more beautiful, charming, and everything- i'm- not than i will ever be. gabe's proven it multiple times when he forgets about me because my friend is a jewel, and i am a little shriveled piece of paper in the corner that's been forgotten. i respect the fact that everyone loves her more than me, because it's true.

but because of my emotions problem, no one has known about how i felt about it. i just told people, "everything's okay." people would ask me, "why aren't you hugging gabe?" but, seriously, my mouth can't form the words. emotions don't compute in my brain. i just feel them, but i can't let people see that i do, so the action of shying away from gabe when he tries to hug me...

i think it's a reflex of some sort. because while i am hurt, why would i shy away from him? i don't know. i don't know anything about anything really. dumb. and maslike, and quiet. no wonder everyone forgets about me.

i try to stay strong. i try to talk myself into, "i don't need them; i always have the other guys." and then the other guy just forgets about me, and my face is a shriveled mess behind that buck-toothed, bright-eyed smile that everyone always sees. i am so pathetic.

but anyway. so i talked to gabe. it wasn't like anything i had prepared myself before. the evening before, i had asked him on facebook if i could talk to him in person the next day, and i prepared my speech about everything i was going to say, and i predicted what his reactions would be...and it turned out totally different. because, now, i don't think i am cured of this emotions problem, but i have a Savior who's whispering, "I'm looking at your heart."

just like He looked at david's heart, and not his features when samuel went to pick out israel's new king. He's leading me up somewhere. where? i cannot say. but it'll be alright in the end.

i don't have time to maintain these regrets when i think about the way...He loves us.