Tag: Emotion

When I was a kid I thought you were born ugly so you can be pretty when you’re an adult, and then be ugly again as you die old and crippled.

There were ritualistic processes of thinking that controlled how I viewed the world and myself inside of it.

Some rituals included my own ways of believing that if I didn’t want something, it would come to me. If I didn’t yearn for something, my disinterest will attract me to it. Some negative energy bullshit.

No, psychiatry calls it delusional thinking on the obsessive side. Just a stressed child having difficulty processing the environment of an immigrant household. Who knows how hard it is to navigate multiple lives? It’s enough to make a child have neurosis, just a touch shy of OCD. It explains the vocal tics that came and went during my early childhood.

If I had a gentle parent, I would have probably grown into a much less exceptional person. Less original, much more stable with consistent friends and relationships. Instead, I had the absence of emotional regulation, masked by corrected behaviors.

Today, I am much more emotionally regulated, with stabilized patterns of moods that flow comfortably between different life events. They transition with reason. Is this why nobody sees me as an outlier anymore? Because I’m no longer different in their eyes? I am predictable. I am not erratic.

I can only thank the fact that there is art and performance allowing my energy to flow out without hurting anyone. I do not need anything other than dance and music to make me happy. Sex is great, but have you bobbed to the Wailers or felt the climax of an orchestra’s finale? Have you felt the moment that music becomes one with the surrounding it fills? There’s a moment when music fills the rooms until it’s about to burst out, explode through the walls. It’s the moment when everyone can feel the beat, sway and jump to how the tempo changes. Rhythmic movements collide in ecstasy with the melody, and all differences of life, money, religion, all disappear.