If you imagine yourself as someone who values logic and regularly puts it to use, it’s not fun to learn that the emotions have basically been running the show. Growing up, and all throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I always knew that my emotions were different. I certainly sensed that they were heavier and more intense. Though I didn’t understand it at the time, I always, always had a hard time coming down from them.
I still have a hard time coming down from them. How do you think I ended up in a mental hospital?
Imagine your emotions being on edge, all the time, while those around you interpret them as manifestations of temper tantrums, sore losing, and childishness. I can’t claim that these terms only apply to me because of BPD, of course, but the diagnosis does not do these tendencies any favors.
I had practically imagined myself with the stoicism of a fully evolved Vulcan, not the blogging wreck that can’t figure out how to tame his emotional responses
The signs that pointed to the weight of my emotions were there for years, but perhaps nowhere quite so obvious as my taste in the arts. When I take an adventure into a novel, a record, a show, or a film, one of my informal requirements is this: I must be able to, at least in part, appreciate the art by getting a sense of its emotional texture. I like art that gives me clear and powerful feelings. As such, I’m often attracted to media in which the themes are cosmic and heavy. The late Cormac McCarthy, one of my top 2 favorite novelists in the history of literature, once said of art, “If it doesn’t concern life and death, it’s not interesting.”
And what sort of works did Cormac produce during his tenure on earth? Perhaps his most celebrated is “The Road,” the crushingly lovely story of a father and a son, traveling post apocalypse America in search of respite. In 2007, McCarthy’s brutal novel about the drug trade in the American southwest, No Country for Old Men, ended up as the source material for an Oscar winning picture. Early in his career, McCarthy wrote the novel many consider his darkest, “Blood Meridian.” To this day, that last text is the only book I ever read that 1) I loved, and 2) made me unsure as to whether I could read it again. The bloodshed contained therein is, to put it mildly, excessive. I still can’t forget the scene that involves a flowing river, a group of puppies, and a burlap sack. And no, I won’t summarize that scene here.
I am, after all, trying to grow readership, not repel it.
When I was in my late years in grade school, I found myself drifting away from general fiction and into the fantastic and the “horrible.” I didn’t mind more realistic, less fantastic, less stylized stories about the world I lived in, but I always eager to escape from it and see what could happen elsewhere. At first I gobbled up the short but charming stories from “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” This was followed by a few years of reading R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. By the middle of junior high I was reading Stephen King novels on the regular.
And what do those novels cover? In “The Stand”, the population of earth dies in a super virus, which in turn prepares the forces of good and evil for one final epic showdown. In “The Shining,” an alcoholic father takes his traumatized family to a haunted hotel for a Coloradan winter. In “IT,” a species of alien takes the form of whatever the children in Derry, Maine are afraid of so it can feed on it, as well as the children themselves.
These stories are a dark and brooding in their own way, and I love them all for it.
The darkness can certainly jump off the page, or off the screen, and onto my body. BPD gives those who have it extraordinary expressive personalities, making graphic t-shirt collections or tattoos virtually inevitable (and inevitably expensive!) On my right arm, I have a tattoo of the album artwork from My Chemical Romance’s beloved concept record, “The Black Parade.” The artwork depicts a group of skeletons, dressed in full marching band attire, making their way down a desolate city block. Below this tattoo, on the right forearm, is a tattoo of a plague doctor. Plague doctors were medieval physicians who wore bird like masks and large, wide brimmed hats. If a plague doctor had to stop by your residence in the days of the black death, that was hardly a good sign. Garden variety antibiotics were, to the distress of 1/3 of the population of Europe, centuries away.
On the opposite arm I have a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the detective story as we know it, and the mind behind some of the greatest, emotionally charged pieces of literature in our language. Poe takes his readers through a brutal murder in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” animal cruelty in “The Black Cat,” loss and regret in “The Raven,” and revenge most extreme in “The Cask of Amontillado.” Those with a fear of being buried while alive should pay especial attention to Cask.
And just what do I listen to when I’m working, reading, or doing any other activity in which my fingers and my ears can both take on their own tasks? Music that not only makes me feel something, but the heaviest, darkest, most emotive somethings. I have rarely said “I love this music” to tracks that don’t consistently take me into emotional depths. There’s lots of good music that doesn’t rely on emotive delivery, of course. I have no problem listening to the carefree tunes of the late Jimmy Buffet; I just don’t find much power or emotional behind them. They are fun songs that pair well with fruity cocktails.
I want more than a cocktail here.
When I turn the music up, I want to hear songs about all the things, the big things, the comic things, and the things that keep people awake at night. I want songs that make me feel the feels, and that inspire me to channel my emotions and work something positive out of them. If I don’t feel something, I’m not likely to act on it either, at least with any enthusiasm. I want songs like, “Graveyard of the Fireflies” by The Raven Age, or “Watch the World Burn” by Falling in Reverse,” or “Famous Last Words,” by My Chemical Romance.
And speaking of those pop-punk emo phenoms: I find the lyrics to the opening of Black Parade rather appropriate here. In the opening track, “The End,” the listener is promised an emotional tour de force. See for yourself. As the record opens, our main character in it, “The Patient,” says:
[Now come one come all
To this tragic affair
Wipe off that make up
What’s in is despair
So throw on the black
Dress, mix in with the
Lot
You might wake up and notice
You’re someone you’re not.
If you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see
You can find out firsthand what it’s
Like to be me.]
What’s it like to be me?
My emotions have betrayed me more often than not in life. I have placed a heaping amount of blame on how they have affected my mood, relationships, friendships, and goals. I have often wondered if there was anything I could to shut the emotions off and still live. As it turns out there are means for this, but they’re generally considered cruel and have fallen out of practice in much of the world.
Given that I have often looked at my emotions as an adversary, I can’t help but look at my taste in the arts as a giant slice of irony. I talk the rational game in front of people, but in reality?
My emotions are hungry, and I feed them.
Somebody help me.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
This is another on point blog. The intensity of feelings and not being able to turn them off… another shared experience. Keep going!