learn how to express my feelings

I decided to take a break from 1-1-30 because I had no idea what I was doing.

One more day of success!

The negative feeling was really hard. I feel tense and exhausted. And embarrassed. I monitored myself to not pull any stunts, you know, sarcasm, irony, or minimizing anything, or exaggerating anything… And then there it was, laid bare. It felt kind of pointless and I don’t really feel good that I said it. On the other hand, since it was a feeling of hostility towards someone, I know that having said it prevents me from expressing that hostility in some inappropriate way such as active or passive aggression. So I guess it was a good thing. I hope it was a good thing, cause what I’m feeling right now is the exact reason why sometimes I hate expressing myself. :(

My positive feeling was, conversely, completely painless. I was a little shy about it but it was nice.

This is surprisingly hard.

Positive and negative feelings were expressed today via e-mail, so I’ll consider myself in the clear even though I wasn’t as deliberate or as articulate as I would have liked. Also, I’d like to pratice doing this in person more.

I had never realized how few are the people that I have any desire to express feelings to. They’re about the count of one hand…

My negative feeling: I told this friend who teases me about being a miser that I don’t like him teasing me about that. This was great because I had been wanting to say this for a while.

My positive feeling: I wrote a short e-mail to my sister telling her to write to me because I miss her. :) No jokes, just a brutally honest request. I actually did this a split second ago because – surprise, surprise – I STILL hadn’t managed to find something positive to express all day and I had to come up with something. I never thought this would be the hard part, but there you go. I’m glad to have learned this, though, cause I guess it’s important to work on the positive side too. This is especially hard around my family, because we tend not to express feelings to one another. When we do, we usually resort to humor or a second language.

I’m trying, you know? I’m trying really hard.

So, the craziest thing happened yesterday.

I mentioned a boyfriend here several times. The crazy thing that happened was that I was talking to him and he mentioned the personality test that appeared here on 43 Things a few weeks (or months?) ago. I thought it was funny he should mention it because I haven’t seen this anywhere else, so that must mean he came to the site. I asked him if he had an account and he said he didn’t. Ok. So later I e-mail him asking if he was on the site because he was reading my stuff.

He was.

That was mind-blowing. First, I never had a clue he was there. I knew he could easily find my entries because I had shown him the list once, but he never said anything! I never imagined he would read them and not say anything. Second, all the time I had wanted him to be there. Again: I knew he could easily find this stuff, right? But after some time, since he made no comment, I assumed he hadn’t taken much interest in the list and hadn’t returned to it and had never seen the stuff I had later written about us. So 43 Things gradually became a place for myself, for venting and for recording things.

And then suddenly it’s kind of like I’ve been talking to myself in my room for the longest time and suddenly I realize that there’s someone closeby who heard everything I said, including what I said about them.

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I feel really good that all the things which I said here that I wished he knew were in fact made known to him. On the other, I feel like now I can never really be that spontaneous again. Writing when I know he’s reading is inevitably writing for him, and even though right now I’m talking about him in the third person like he’s not here, he is. (Hi.) I can’t quite wrap my head around this. And then here I am writing.

But I had a point when I started this post. And my point is this:

I started thinking about changing my username to gain my illusion of privacy back. (Turns out it can’t be done. I thought our IDs could be our e-mails but they’re actually our usernames.) But then, on the back of my mind, I immediately started wondering if there was any way he could find out my new username. As in, because I wanted him to. Writing when there was no chance he was reading would be just as bad as writing when there is no chance he isn’t.

And I realized that it was never about privacy, it really was about me finding an indirect way to communicate with him, one through which I couldn’t be held accountable for anything I was saying. (The fact that he picked up on that and therefore never mentioned anything about being a reader goes to show that he knows me well.) Even though after a certain point that kind of slipped to my subconscious, the fact that I would want him to track me if I moved my stuff makes me think that I didn’t ever really stop hoping that he was out there.

The weird thing is that I never even wrote anything I wouldn’t say to him. In fact, many of the things that I posted about I talked to him about later. It’s funny to remember myself explaining the “Tell, don’t show” system to him when he had probably read about it here months ago; or to think that his reaction when I told him I had cut myself was probably not his first reaction to this news. So why did I need this? Why was it so important for me to pretend to myself and to him that it wasn’t him I wanted to reach?

I’m not sure.

I love this website. And I like writing here. And, of course, much of the stuff I did post was not meant for him, it was really just for the fun of writing about the goals. (Skirt’s hangers? Naan? :)) So I know I won’t stop writing. I’m not sure if the tone of my writing will change. I’m not sure if I’ll start discussing my posts with him or if I’ll feel better never talking about it and pretending that he’s not reading them. I’m not sure.

All I know is that this makes me feel like the truth is that after all the effort, and the fights, and the promises, and the tears, and the books, and the exercises, and the posts, and the little things that looked like progress along the way, the truth is that I’m still the shy and insecure girl who doesn’t look people in the eye and speaks so low that her words are impossible to understand, because as long as no one knows who she is she can explain to herself why they don’t like her.

I was thinking about how some of the goals here are hard to track. Like, when do you know that you’ve actually learned how to express your feelings? It’s not just because you did it once. And it’s not just doing one big, significant thing either (I can easily think of what mine would be: hugging Dad and telling him I love him :)), cause what’s it worth if you can’t express the little things? Grand gestures are one thing, keeping it up day after day is another. And the little things are hard to even judge! Sometimes I feel like I’ve made progress but then I wonder if it’s all in my head. Am I stuck? I don’t really know. Besides, I feel like it kind of winds back and forth. It gets easier and then it gets harder. Am I getting anywhere? It’s a mystery.

Right now I can think of nothing to call a finishing line for this. And of course strictly speaking there’s none, but I want to check stuff off the list. :D

So I came up with this exercise for myself. (Oh, BTW, I finally have money for a CB therapist. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t have money before, but it was committed to something else. So I guess I can pay someone to assign me exercises even though I already do it myself. Is that stupid?)

Starting today, I will deliberately and healthily express one positive and one negative feeling every day for thirty days. No restrictions about what or to whom; my only restriction is that I have to actually articulate it clearly and own it, not be passive-aggressive or sarcastic or elusive or throw it like a dart to hurt someone.

This sounds just simple enough that it’s absolutely doable, and yet not so simple that it’s completely trivial. At least not for me. :D

Let’s see what happens.

I have a problem which I don’t believe is very common. When I have an argument with someone I love, especially if they’ve initiated and are expressing hostility towards me, and even more so when I actually did something to provoke and acknowledge it and feel guilty, I go mute.

I have extreme difficulty expressing myself in such circumstances. Usually I’m desperately trying to talk but words just don’t come out. I panic. It’s particularly frustrating because more often than not it is the case that the other person wants me to talk and is urging me to do so, but the more they pressure me, the harder it becomes.

It’s been worse than it is now. Thankfully, I was in a relationship for over a year with someone who was very understanding about that and always found a way to gently enourage me to talk. Now I’m in a different relationship, with, again thankfully, someone who is also very understanding about this, but unfortunately we’re in very difficult circumstances and that has prevented us from working on the issue together as I think we would otherwise.

I’ve never known of anyone who had this sort of emotional blank. I associate mine mostly with feelings of guilt, but it’s not the only thing that triggers it… I wish I could talk to someone about it. Anyone?

So I open my e-mail and there’s a note from him apologizing for what he said yesterday that made me upset. Looks like after all it did make a difference. :)

You know what I just realized?

It’s easy to get so caught up in the whole “express your feelings” thing that you simply stop listening to the other person. I think I may just have done that. I ended a conversation saying something like, “Well, this wasn’t how I hoped this conversation would end, but I’ve think I’ve been perfectly clear about what I’m feeling and what I wish you would do and I don’t know where to go from here.” (Which, I see now, was a little passive agressive.) Then he said: “I think I’ve made myself clear as well.”

I was thinking about that now and I thought: “Did he?” It didn’t come across very clear. I should have been listening more closely. I didn’t know what to say anymore, but that didn’t mean we had to stop talking. It meant I had to.

Having wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, I must have been under heavy influence of one of the best pieces of advice a writer can get: “Show, don’t tell.”

“Show, don’t tell” works beautifully in fiction. As a reader,you don’t want to be told what the character is thinking, you want to get in his/her head and hear it. You don’t want to be told how everyone falls in love with the heroine because of how wonderful she is, you want her to actually charm you into falling in love with her. You don’t want mere descriptions, you want enactments.

As it turns out, however, enactments don’t work as beautifully in real life. Slamming the door may even be in its own way more expressive than saying “I feel very angry right now, and I don’t like what you said”. But it sure as hell won’t solve the problem. And it’s likely not to get the message across as efficiently: what do you think people are more likely to be nondefensive about, slamming doors or composed words?

And this with slamming doors. Passive aggressiveness gets a lot more complicated than that; when I look at things I’ve done to express anger and other feelings, I realize that over my life I’ve created intricate codes to tell people how I feel, and that I let it get to the point where I had no clue if people had any idea what I was feeling or not, and the only thing my acting out was sure to do was hurt them.

Well, on the less argumentative side, I’m more and more convinced that telling is actually easier than showing. At the very least it’s less tiring – you don’t have to obssess about whether the other person is reading all your crazy signs and you’re able to relax and say, “Ok, I said it, he knows it, now what’s next?” It’s also generally more emotionally rewarding – you know you’re doing the healthy thing, and you feel immediatey relieved to know you’ve made yourself clear in plain English and you don’t have to wonder whether your code was deciphered.

What I’m still getting used to is that – prepare to be shocked ;) – expressing feelings does not magically end all conflicts! :) Of course I never rationally or consciously expected it to, but I guess I’m still a little surprised every time I say something like “I’m really angry right now” (instead of just hanging up the phone, for instance) and that doesn’t end the fight. In my head, I’m like: “Erm… I said I was angry. Did he…? Yep, he heard me. Hm. So… we’re still doing this?”

Aparently we are. But even if we’re still gonna fight, having expressed what I was feeling makes a difference. Maybe in the end it won’t to the relationship, but it does to me.