To Feel Deeply

If there is one thing I have learned about myself in my twenty years of existence it’s that I feel too deeply.

I guess it seems odd to think that someone could feel too deeply, but I do. Whatever I feel, I really feel. The moment an emotion is triggered, good or bad, it courses through my veins like blood pumping to keep my heart beating. It’s as if only the most extreme emotions are what keep me alive. Without them my veins would run dry, choke on themselves, crippled and collapsed. The only problem is, these emotions aren’t blood necessary for life, they are poison, slowly eating away at me from the inside out, attacking from within, relentless in their pursuit. And the harder I try to stop the poison from entering the most intricate crevices of this body I inhabit I can’t stop them. I fight and I plead with them to go away, but that only seems to encourage them. They multiply and divide and multiply again, surging through me and overtaking me.

Inwardly I’m cracked outwardly I’m warped. My relationships become strained, from the inside out annoyance, anger, rage, and the most destructive of them all, jealousy, seep through my skin, leaking out of my pores, pooling at my feet, drowning me for all to see. I watch as these feelings slowly chisel away at the relationships I’ve just spent months sculpting from the ground up. Though they can’t feel the substance crack, I can see it, and I can feel it. I can do nothing but sit and watch the pieces I’ve fought to piece together slowly loosen their grip, crumbling to the floor, hitting in slow motion, erupting. I scream as I try to catch the falling pieces but they only crumble in my hand, turn to dust, and slide through the cracks in my fingers.

After enough futile attempts at holding onto what will soon be gone, I begin to look inward, to the source. I find it, deep inside my heart, and I begin to feel something altogether new. Though this new feeling is laced with hatred, the subject is not outside of me; rather the hatred-like feeling is turned inward, onto myself. I begin to resent the very source of all the outward deterioration. With all the force I’ve ever felt, I understand that I am the root of all of my trouble, and without much hesitancy, I begin to hate myself, my insides, the part of me that is causing these feelings to rush to every corner of who I am.

And though I’ve come to realize these things, I find myself in an inescapable fissure, hanging on by only a thin strand of hope and hate. I try to kick and I try to fight but these actions only put more tension on the already hyperextended strands holding me in place. The more I fight the hate the more I find myself sinking lower and lower into unexplainable depths.

And in these twenty years of existence I’ve come to realize that this battle within me is one I cannot win. 

[alc]