onsdag 8. juli 2015

Name the feeling

1. I'm in a particular mood today, I don't think I know the word for it in English? It's a shade of sadness. I know several shades of sadness in my own language, but my command of English stops about there, when I need the exact right word for something. Right word at the right time.

It's a type of gloominess, I know that much. And it has to do with loneliness and longing, it's the feeling that makes it seem as if I’m never able to relax with someone, with the possible exception of my mother and sister (drawing lines to what I wrote last year on self-disgust, as if relaxing my personality is like relaxing my bladder, I actually have the anxious image that if I let my guard down I’ll wet myself). It's the feeling of what a kiss would be like on my lips, what the back of my finger would feel like against someone’s cheek, or in their hair. It's a nice kind of sadness in a way, because those things are nice.

If someone were to stick a pole into this sadness and stir around a little, I’m sure my eyes would flow over for a while, though there would be no sobs, and crying like that would feel like hugging a large happy dog, or a stuffed animal, something that’s nothing but soft and warm. Except for its tug on my consciousness, unsettling me a little, except for the questions about my life that intrude on me in this mood, it's mostly a pleasant sadness.

I know a word or two I’d use for it in Norwegian, but still can't come up with in in English, but maybe I can capture more with a description than with the exact right word anyway. So yeah, that's how I'm feeling today. 

2. Today it's Wednesday. The above was written last Saturday, 4 days ago, with the intent to post that day, but it got delayed. Feelings have changed since then... tiny epihanies come and gone, found and lost and revisited, as is the way of feelings and epiphanies, which really makes them into the opposite of epiphanies, I suppose?

Just read through my previous entry as well, from June, and it deals with the lot of the same, the same longing-hope-sadness as in this one. One feeling relieving the other, revisiting the next... if ther anything to say of larger scale development, it might be that I'm getting a sense of this. That feelings are always there, always confusing, the define my subjective experience, that is to say the entirety of my experience, so life will always have little bits of confusion floating around in it. It's the way of humanity really.

It's the realization that I'll have to spend effort, there's no way around it. Action or passivity, they all require effort. Laying in bed, frustrated from passivity, takes effort. I've talked about relaxation, calm... but that has to be something other than not expanding effort, right?

Understanding my feelings, too, sharing them with others... there will always be a measure of confusion. There will always be a measure of subjectivity, stuff that has to be mine alone.

I think moving out has done a lot to spur this recent blooming of feelings and confusion. Being alone with everyday tasks that I used to have help with before. Being responsible for every one of them... is teaching me how lonely responsibilities can be, and if I leave them to someone else, that's just a transferral of loneliness. Even doing things together... muscular action, raising an arm or a foot, I'm all alone in sending the mental command for that.

It's daunting, but not as discouraging as one might believe. Parts of it I'm looking forward to.