by CJ Quines • on
at arm’s length
on emotional distance
one
the other day i was walking home and thinking, i’m gonna miss this some day. i’m gonna miss the coworking space i pass by, and the scaffolding next to our building, and the elevator i take to get to our apartment. i’ve written about losing the wonder of place: “You’ll never be able to look at [MIT’s] architecture and find it new.” and it’s true, you can’t ever experience it as-new, but i think you can still feel wonder if you tap into it.
i tried to reach for the sensations. i’m gonna miss walking under that eternal too-low scaffolding, or passing by that gold-tinged antiques-shop-turned-coworking-space, or heading up four floors in a cramped elevator where the close-doors button works. the experiences flow into my mind, converted into streams of words.
i’ve puzzled over the irony of thinking, i need to experience this place. in the meta direction, i can ask why i feel this need, and i can say things about anticipated nostalgia, and improving my perceptual skill, and that i don’t need need to do it, but it’d be nice to, and in thinking about these things i am pulling myself away from the direction the thought points toward. the place and time for these thoughts is elsewhere and elsewhen. the loop i leave open, and i attend again to the world around me.
two
recent news has steeped my future in uncertainty. when i discuss the details with friends, they’d express concern for my well-being, or help me with problem-solving. i appreciate both of these things, and i love my friends for providing them, and i think i need them. yet part of me labels these as unnecessary: why are you concerned? everything going on is fine.
i’ve worried before about failing to feel sadness. i’ve blamed it on the antidepressants. i’ve found a new thing to blame, a new fear i shared with andrew the other night: that i have analyzed my emotions so much that i no longer feel them.
look at how i write about depression and anger, see how devoid they are of color. i have built these scaffolds to understand sentiments, and i have called this maturity. perhaps by doing so i am pulling myself away from my feelings. perhaps i have written myself into a corner, where i can only engage with feelings this way. perhaps i can only examine emotions when i hold them at arm’s length.
three
last wednesday, i received more news, and it was unbearable to the point that i left work early, cried in the subway, came home, then cried at home without sobbing, for what must have been two or three hours. that night, i wrote:
the whole thing makes me feel textbook hopelessness:
- The future seems vague and uncertain to me
- It is very unlikely that I will get any real satisfaction in the future
- All I can see ahead of me is unpleasantness rather than pleasantness
- There’s no use in really trying to get something I want because I probably won’t get it
- I might as well give up because I can’t make things better for myself
apparently, the best way to express my feelings was to quote items from the beck hopelessness scale as a scaffold.
as much as i want to laugh at how clinical my approach was, i should grant my past self the same understanding i have offered before: it was still me who wrote this, a week ago. do i not trust myself to accurately write about what i felt? maybe the difference between writing this and writing metaphors is a matter of expression, not degree.
the next day, i woke up, and i was fine.