My Emotions Ride the Short Bus

I was pondering the Text Message Fiasco, and I think I've figured something out: I am emotionally retarded.

It's not that I don't have emotions: I have lots in fact, annoying ones that won't go away. But it's like there's a disconnect between my heart and my head. There's a major lag between the point when I start feeling something, and the point when I gain any sort of rational grasp on what the feeling might be called, what might be causing it, or what I should maybe, like, DO about it. This condition has caused me much trauma over the years. It's also caused me to miss some golden opportunities: on at least one occasion I would have been completely justified in delivering a full-on Victorian-style bitch slap to a particular dude, which would have been deeply satisfying. Sadly, I only realized this a week later, when the nagging feeling of "Hm...what he just said made me feel funny" finally crystalized into "Holy shit, did he actually say that to me?"

I think this condition of being astronomically out of touch with your emotions is also known as "having a male brain," which would fit with my severe case of Male Answer Syndrome. But frankly my feminine pride has taken enough hits this weekend, so fuck that shit.

The term 'emotionally retarded' fits well, I think, because I'm slow at this stuff. It's so maddening: words are my mode of being. My interior life is almost entirely verbal: I think in words, with only an occasional picture. And not just in words, but in conversations, people in my head speaking to each other and I to them. Explaining things is what I do best: break a concept down in my head, and as I speak watch it be created again in the air in front of me. And yet when I have to put words to my own emotions, when I have to tell someone what I feel, I'm completely mute. I speak in halting sentences that don't say what I mean, and I can feel them not saying what I mean but I can't do anything about it. It's like all of a sudden becoming autistic. My words are what I live by, and when they betray me it's the worst feeling in the world.

This is why relationship talks are disastrous for me. I've never once had a good relationship talk...well, I haven't really had a good relationship, either, which is depressing as hell but beside the point. Basically, when you have a What's Going On With Us talk, it occurs in real-time, face-to-face, right? Which means that I have to figure out (a) what I'm feeling in real-time and (b) what a completely different person from me is also feeling. In real-time. And as we've noted, I process my emotions with all the speed of a 486 computer trying to run Morrowind. So every fucking time, I walk away from the talk going, well, that didn't go so badly. And when it turns out that, yes, it did go badly, in the way that the Challenger lift-off "went badly," I'm kind of bloody mystified until gradually the light dawns on all the things I should have noticed, and all the things I should have said, and dear Lord all the things I should not have said.

This is why I find writing so cathartic. I can sit down and think about stuff that's happened, let the emotions process, and arrange them on the page so they make sense. Or at least more sense. Sometimes.

It's so strange. It's like I only really feel something after it happens, later on when I'm writing it down, when I can finally translate the interior event into words.