Emoting
I remember the day I decided that it was better to show no emotion than it was to show my emotions to the people around me. It was probably in 1986. Twenty years of conditioned responses to what people did around me. As I sit here writing this I remember the day, the place I was in, what I was looking at, and I have some memories of the surrounding events. I was twelve. It was in Temple, TX, I was sitting in a classroom at Bonham Middle School, and I was going through a rather emotional time. All children, at 12, go through rather emotional moments - but for whatever reason that is logical and makes sense to the mind of a twelve-year-old, I stopped caring that day, stopped emoting, and decided that my life was better served by not showing what I feel to the uninitiated than to go about showing others what was going on inside of me.
That is not to say that I don't feel. In truth, there is a wellspring of emotion that goes on beneath the surface. I would imagine that if people saw the exterior and then jumped beneath the surface to see what was really going on (a lot of the time) the dichotomy of emotion and lack of showing would become rather transparent. Know me long enough and you know when I am going through something; but the outcome is and may always be that I just don't show what I am feeling. I very much show what I am thinking, but thought and emotion are slightly different and, as stated, the outcome is that I don't show the emotion.
I don't know why this is suddenly so important. Some weeks ago the girls in the cast of Crimes of the Heart decided to tease me about not showing emotion. Oh, get me on-stage and I can show a pretty good range of happy, flustered, angry, upset, whatever, I know what the emotions are, I apparently know how to show them, but remove the stage and have normal, everyday human interactions and I don't show anything. Put me at a card table and deal the cards, papa's come to bluff. I'm probably not that good, but the truth of the matter is that I don't feel it necessary to show a lot of what is going on internally.
You probably need more.
Well, at twelve I'd somewhat recently discovered Star Trek. Yes, Star Trek. Not Star Wars (though I do recall seeing the first movie originally in the theater), Star Trek. Captain Kirk, Bones, Mr. Spock. Mr. Spock is a Vulcan. Vulcan's are a highly logical race of beings that inhabit the planet Vulcan. Mr. Spock was the juxtaposition to Captain Kirk. Kirk was emotion, Spock was logic. I don't think any iteration of Star Trek or any iteration of any science fiction television show or movie has ever put emotion and logic together like that. It was genius. Where Kirk could go off half-bent, Spock was there to ground him. Where Kirk would fall in love, Spock was there to remove the hormonal imbalance. As the series progressed through three season (and eight movies, or was it seven?) Spock got to show more emotion and Kirk got to show more restraint, but the origination of the two polar opposites with the conscience of Bones thrown in, the mediator of the two, absolutely genius.
I don't go out of my way to watch Star Trek anymore. If it's on and I have nothing better to do, sure. I'm willing. But the truth of the matter is that I don't have the need to watch that show. I grew out of a lot of science fiction. I grew out of identifying with a lot of the elements to science fiction that draw young men (and young women) to it. You stop identifying with Spock or Kirk and find other heroes in other places. My heroes are real, tangible, alive people who make mistakes. My heroes are special to me. Spock stopped being special round about the age of 15.
However, finding Star Trek and Spock was a defining moment in my life. It was probably one of the defining moments in my life. And there I was sitting in an English class, I'd probably just gotten in trouble at home, this was one of the first classes of the day, I was an awkward twelve year old, one of the other kids in the class may have said something to me about my hair, the glasses I wore back when, me being me, and the combination of bad grades (because I wasn't focused) and a bad home life, and a series of other events, to include being hyper-emotional as a twelve-year-old, came together and the outcome was seeing a picture of my hero, Spock, and deciding that if a Vulcan can lose all emotion and emotional ties, so can I.
Twenty years later I would love to know how to reverse that. I would love to be able to go back to that younger me and put my arm around his shoulder, tell him that in twelve months my home life would change drastically, that things were going to get better, and that I didn't have to shield myself from the world by not feeling. But I can't. I can't go back to that young man and tell him anything. The joys and pains of being in the real world, in a real environment, with real people, and real science, where the laws of physics and time actually mean something, and where theory cannot be spun off into some weird tale of rebirth and renewal. I don't know that I would want to go back to that young man, it was, after all, Texas, but I do know that in a moment of despair and depression I made a choice that has followed me throughout my entire life.
I can look at you, I can feel something, and unless you are one of the anointed, you will probably never know the difference. I can count, still, on one hand the number of times I've cried since my mission. I can count between the two hands the number of times I've wanted to cry and couldn't. I know what it feels like to stand next to someone and to have them need me to emote and not being able to do it. I know what it does inside of me. I fear dying a little more inside every time someone needs that from me, or I need that from me, and not being able to deliver it.
There are justifications for the lack of emotion. I am supposed to be a leader of men. That's what I've been told throughout my life. I show that on occasion. In the lack of leadership I can step up and step forward. I've done it throughout my life. The religious leaders I see don't often show or express emotion. I've heard it said that the right emotion expressed at the wrong time can have a more devastating effect on the people receiving it than a wrong emotion expressed at the right time. You can forgive someone their faults so long as their faults don't offend you too wholly. You can forgive someone not showing you something, so long as you understand that the spirit, timing, the people dictate when and how an emotion is expressed. In an assembly of a lot of people it may be completely inappropriate. In an assembly of one or two or a few (less than a dozen) than the emotion can be very freeing and real and necessary.
I am in a pit of my own digging. I like a lot of the people I am around daily, weekly, nightly, and on the weekends. They joke around with me and I wish I could give more. But twenty years of conditioning is a long time and you don't change overnight. I didn't, at twelve, immediately stop emoting. It took a long time. It took years to get to the point where I wasn't going to show that weakness. And it is only through growing up and relating to people and becoming older and having to experience that onslaught of emotion that does become necessary (off-stage) at various times that I've come to realize that two decades and an emotional time ago, I made a very poor choice that affects familial relations, it affects friend relations, it affects passive relations, and it affects the way people interact with me even through school or work. I don't emote a lot. It's who I am. It is, unfortunately, who I am.
As a closing thought, various friends over the years have told me that I am one of the happiest people they know. This has come after being told by someone that I am always mad, angry, or upset. However, friends have seen beneath the surface. Granted, to know me means to know that I have key words and phrases that can speak volumes about my emotional state, but that is to know me and some friends have gotten to know me like that:
When I go home,
and go to bed,
and close my eyes,
and rest my head,
my eyes don't crinkle
and my mouth don't smile,
but there are thoughts,
that turn the trials
to sunshine and then fade away,
because though it don't show,
I smile all through the day.
I will admit that my friends and family, in this area, deserve much better at my hands.