Today, today as I write this, probably not today when I publish this, right now, I am having emotions.
This is a fairly normal thing, right? We're living breathing animals, we have emotions. However, I find it confusing. Some emotions I've managed to more or less pin down: dreading, pleased, frustrated, comfortable, neglected, some others. But many others, I don't truly understand, they are vague and nebulous, just a... feeling, that's affecting me in some way.
As I write this, I'm trying to focus on the emotion I'm going through. It feels tense. It has elements of frustration. I'm also a bit tearful. More than anything, though, I feel disconnected, that I've broken free of my moorings, that my brain isn't tied particularly closely to reality. It's unsettling.
It's not a feeling of physical disconnection, or disembodiment - I'm fortunate enough not to suffer with that - but more that sensory perception is almost overwhelmingly magnified whilst feelings of being me, of being grounded as and within myself, of being conscious and having conscious thoughts and tangible reactions, these all are minimised. Like a dream, a dream of swimming, floating, diving, sinking in a sea of sensations, weightless and timeless and dimensionless.
I'm not sure to what extent this is the autism, or perhaps a consequence of having spent years trying to mentally hide from reality during a period of extended abuse. Nevertheless, I can point to the autism for the difficulty I find in describing it - I'm really not sure how to refer to emotions, to tell them apart. It's an unfamiliar language.
This, these words, these paragraphs, constitute maybe the single greatest effort I've ever made to isolate and identify an emotional thought process. It is a constant, uphill struggle. Discussing emotions makes me feel a bit alien, as if
I'm lacking something inherently human.
But I am human. It's important not to forget that.
This is a fairly normal thing, right? We're living breathing animals, we have emotions. However, I find it confusing. Some emotions I've managed to more or less pin down: dreading, pleased, frustrated, comfortable, neglected, some others. But many others, I don't truly understand, they are vague and nebulous, just a... feeling, that's affecting me in some way.
As I write this, I'm trying to focus on the emotion I'm going through. It feels tense. It has elements of frustration. I'm also a bit tearful. More than anything, though, I feel disconnected, that I've broken free of my moorings, that my brain isn't tied particularly closely to reality. It's unsettling.
It's not a feeling of physical disconnection, or disembodiment - I'm fortunate enough not to suffer with that - but more that sensory perception is almost overwhelmingly magnified whilst feelings of being me, of being grounded as and within myself, of being conscious and having conscious thoughts and tangible reactions, these all are minimised. Like a dream, a dream of swimming, floating, diving, sinking in a sea of sensations, weightless and timeless and dimensionless.
I'm not sure to what extent this is the autism, or perhaps a consequence of having spent years trying to mentally hide from reality during a period of extended abuse. Nevertheless, I can point to the autism for the difficulty I find in describing it - I'm really not sure how to refer to emotions, to tell them apart. It's an unfamiliar language.
This, these words, these paragraphs, constitute maybe the single greatest effort I've ever made to isolate and identify an emotional thought process. It is a constant, uphill struggle. Discussing emotions makes me feel a bit alien, as if
I'm lacking something inherently human.
But I am human. It's important not to forget that.
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