When I left the gym this morning, it was raining. “Yay!” I said aloud as I stepped outside, smiling into the drops that had others scowling as they passed on the sidewalk. I wanted to do the Gene Kelly thing, but I refrained. This time.
Recently I told someone in an instant message, “When I leave the gym in the morning and it is raining, I say YES!!!! and I get all happy.” He said I was “warped” and asked why it makes me happy. I told him I didn’t know why. He questioned me again. I told him I don’t question it or myself. (If I didn’t like the person so much, I would have told him to buzz and/or fuck off, depending on the level of his persistence and insistence that I provide an answer.)
I don’t like to analyze what makes me happy. Or what makes me sad. Or angry. Or what makes me tick or click or anything else. I just like to let things be and to experience them while they’re happening. I will never understand why people choose to torture themselves by wondering, to the point of biting their nails down to the “quick”, why they feel a certain way and what they can do to change it. Rather than worry yourself into paralysis over why you feel sad in whatever situation, wouldn’t it be a relief to just let yourself feel?
I will also never understand people who don’t like to feel what they’re feeling. People who prefer numbness to the stinging slap of emotion. People who don’t “own” their feelings. (Aside: I’m not too fond of the word “own” used this way, but it will just have to do.) People who go home and punch a pillow or a wall two hours after they were actually angry rather than just get into being angry when they’re actually feeling that way.
Anger, like any other emotion, is not a decision. There is nothing wrong with any emotion. What’s wrong is not acknowledging it or expressing it and trying to quiet it down instead of letting it out. Scream. Yell. Pull out your hair. Cry. But under no circumstances should you keep quiet. There’s plenty of time for that when you’re dead.
So it pisses me off when people question other people why they feel the way they do. “I feel the way I do, because it’s the way I feel,” is the way I would respond if I were inclined to do so. But as it is, I prefer a pointed “Don’t question me.”
Why can’t people just let it, and themselves, be? (That question, of course, is rhetorical. I don’t want an answer.)
* What, you were expecting the song?