Introspection for the creative mind

There is a time in one's life when we must reflect. However scary it might be, when we find ourselves confused by the person in the mirror, we reflect to understand the why. When I do this, I find myself to be quite insane, bonkers, Looney, coocoo in the coconut, off my rocker. The thoughts in my head seem ludacris although the conclusions seem (at least to me) to be logically sound.

It starts like this:
For most of my life, I have been able to avoid the god given talent of empathy and introspection with the escapist methods of drugs, sex, video, TV and computer games, TV (in general), writing, alcohol and all the other devices a creative person might accrue to escape reality. This may need some explanation.

When I was little, there were a number of things that went wrong with my childhood, numerous psychologists attempted to fix said problems, However the end result seemed to be the same, I would push all things that I found uncomfortable to deal with to the back of my mind while putting up a shoddy dam to block them from the rest of my brain. Unfortunately, I happen to be more aware than I would like to give myself credit for, maybe even intelligent if I choose to be.

The problem with this awareness is that I can recall the emotion of almost any given time in my life with an image and the thoughts connected to that moment. For instance, the glade plug in vanilla smell has the ability to take me back to the days of a college girlfriend and all of a sudden I will feel the romantic feelings I had for her while knowing that she's long gone. Overall, this will be painful and sucky for me.

While we're on the topic of emotion, however, we might as well go into the part two of my self diagnosis which happens to be the extroversion that came somewhere with this dam. If I had to guess, I would say that the plethora of emotions and memory recall, gave me the ability to identify said emotions in others and somehow jump started a part of my brain that could recognize the emotions of others whether I wanted to or not. My example of this would be the people I interact with daily. Sometimes I may not even seem like I'm reading them because I choose to ignore their emotions in order to interact how I want to and be free with it but I can see the boredom in their eyes, I notice contempt. I also notice the joys, frustration, anger, humor, feebleness and every other emotion permeating off them like cheap perfume. Whether I want to or not, I've trained my mind, somehow to recognize social ques. I see a slight eye twitch, a hesitation in their voice, the slight movement in a smile and it's like I can read their minds because my mind subconsciously recognizes the emotion and adopts it as if it were my own. Do this a few hundred times a day and you become quite exhausted.

The problem becomes when these two unique quirks overload. When I push just enough baggage past the dam in my head that keeps the pain back; right after I've collected so many emotions of others that I cannot distinguish my own anymore.  Bear in mind I did use the word, "subconsciously," to describe my empathic abilities, I don't have control over my emotions when my mind decides to pick up on others. In such a case, I push the empathy back in mg head just as I do the other stresses of life. At some point, however, the dam breaks.

In my case, I exhibit a very real step by step breakdown when the barrier collapses. I see it when it's happening but it feels almost as if I were holding a heated iron inside me that I wanted to put down but can't, inside of me.

Step 1: RAGE-
Rage for me comes on like a faucet being turned on. I get hurt by a trigger and it offends me minorly at first but my mind will cycle the thought. I will fixate on that trigger, cycling the intense pain and stress of it until it's all I can think of. At this point, the trigger, which is commonly an action of another person will become an object to be destroyed. My specialty is knowing psychological weak spots so I will usually attack that first.

Example of Rage:
A co-worker and friend of mine told me, "Don't talk to me," after I'd been an idiot and slacked off while working with him. In his mind, the reason I look mad is because he called me a poor worker but when he looked at me with disapproval and shame, it brings up memories fallen from the shattered dam in my head of my father telling me I could be doing more with myself. The feelings of helplessness, anger at myself, shame and anger at my father's shame in me, all create a rage that builds because my thinking immediately jumps to how dare somebody else look down on me?

Step 2: DEPRESSION AND TEARS -
This is usually after I've passed the point of no return whilst in the rage stage. My emotions have caused me to do/say/feel things I cannot take back. By this point, I've regained some of my control; however, regardless of my control over my temper, I am left with a literally dizzying amount of emotions (some of which aren't even mine), and memories innumerable that represent so many different personal feelings.

As it all spills out onto the floor like a smashed glass of Sprite, I am unable to distinguish what drink was there to begin with anymore. Am I upset about the time a girl read my, "do you like me?" Letter to the class in 5th grade? Or is it perhaps the look of disappointment and shame my father showed me when he caught me self mddicating with marijuana? Of course, this decision seems like it would be easy because I've simplified it but there are about a hundred other moments that cycle again and again like a hundred home movie film reels and all simultaneously. All of these thoughts and emotions, both good and bad; from myself and all those that I've picked up and retained from others, happen simultaneously to make the end result uncontrollable tears due to stress. True, at that moment, part of me is happy but I cannot call it elation; part of me is sad but I can't call it depression; part of me is aloof but part of me also realizes what's going on and is embarrassed so I cry because I feel helpless to do anything else and terrified at the multitude of things I do not want to be feeling.

It's like having a bad trip and you just can't wait for the drug to wear off...

Ultimately though, this leads us into a final stage: ACCEPTANCE AND DENOUMENT -
 In these moments, I feel nothing but the quiet and stillness of complete surrender.  The thoughts of all those around me grow gray and numb like death. Sometimes, I can even see the gray and black and gold dots like one about to pass out. Ironically, it's the same dim-witted and satiated verisimilitude I feel after the gratuitous sex that I would have, at a different point in my life, used to prevent this exact situation.

With drugs, sex and alcohol gone from my life, I suppose I'm going to have to go through some method of release but such fanfare is less easy to experience than the loaded feeling I had while running from this type of implosion. All I really want is that quiet and mindless satisfaction to begin with but also ironically, the silence never lasts long.

The ultimate conclusion to these episodes is that I still struggle with all these thoughts, I just deal with them one at a time and push them back into the back of my mind to try and pick up the pieces like so many scattered jenga blocks until the next eruption. I've been getting better at rebuilding the tower and dealing with the stress of it all but the real danger of an episode like this one is inevitable until I've gotten my life collected into a well oiled machine that runs its self. Sometimes I still smoke a cigarette to bandaid a bad situation and sometimes it works but it's not a permenant solution to the stress of a fractured mind. I wonder if sometimes, I might be better off with a drink to hold me over in sweet obliteration while I use the bit of semblance that I have in said stupor to get things done? What's the next step? Well for all the self diagnosing and psychology I've studied to try and repair myself, maybe I need a second brain to analyze the data for me but to find such a mind would be as easy as finding a soul mate. There's a reason I never stayed with any psychologist for too long: it's because they work slow and they don't understand how quickly I need results to problems that span years. As of now, I'll only be well when I learn to fix some of these difficult issues on mg own or learn a cleaver way to deal with them.

Nature vs. Nurture

It's the time old question of the nature of good and evil. Is one born bad (or good for that matter) or do we become who we are through a series of life trials? We can trace this debate back as early as man questioned his existence, however, the first person to discuss it (in reference to hereditary and environment on social advancement) was a cousin of Charles Darwin, named Francis Galton.

Galton was an English student of polymath and anthropology. For those who don't know, these are the studies of multiple sciences and studies to come to a concise conclusion and the study of human beings, past and present, drawing from social, biological, natural sciences and the humanities, respectively. Galton was at heart a statistician and as if to prove himself thus, he was the first to apply statistics to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence. He also was the first to introduce surveys and questionnaires in comunities in order to aid him in his research into anthropometry, which is the study of the measurement of the human individual. In anthropometry, he could literally study why one person sits in their chair at a 45° angle and why another chooses an angle closer to 90°. In these collective ways, Galton may have been the ideal candidate to study the question of nature vs. Nurture when he first asked it in the 1800's.

As I have previously stated, he wasn't the first to ponder the question but rather the first to construct such a concept concisely. The question of why are we the way we are has been going on for centuries and spans the interests of scientists, right up to Madison Avenue. One may recall, "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybe line." Although it may be a bit of a stretch, the question of make up executives is how do we stray from the idea of natural beauty to convince the populace that human beings are far better off since they learned to put on make up.

Ultimately, the argument's good on both sides and god knows advertisers are great at setting fashion trends that we were definitely not born with but when it comes down to it, sociopathy and psychopathy both can be inherited genetically as well as being a developmental phenomenon. It's due to this realization that I say people are not as simple as an "either/or." We are a compilation of all things that include both genetics and how we were raised. Without the sum of our parts, we'd be no better than animals. In this way, Darwin was right: we evolved. We are not just nature or nurture but nature and nurture. More importantly, we are human and because of this, we will always be a product of chance beyond what we can comprehend.