Day 25: Understanding

What’s one thing you wish non-borderlines could understand?

Intensity. One word sums it up better than a scroll of words a mile long. I wish people could feel, just for one second how deeply the emotions sink in, the fear, the anger, the pain, and on a good day, the love. Sometimes things affect me so intensely it seems like I can’t survive it, or don’t want to. I’ve written at length about the waves of emotion, highly charged and changeable like the tide. One small gust of wind and everything moves in a different direction, powerful enough to suck you and anyone nearby under. 

To the outside, nothing may have happened, nothing discernible anyway, but we will have registered a ton of information and triggers that cause avalanche to break inside us. Not seeing the ton of data that we see coming in must look rather like watching someone walk down the street making wild hand gestures and facial expressions only to realize later that they have a bluetooth ear bud in. They look crazy and overly dramatic, but that’s because you can’t see that there’s something else they’re hearing or seeing that you can’t. Like I’ve said before, it’s no superpower and a lot of what registers is wrong or misinterpreted. I know my satellite dish needs a good cleaning, or at least a change in the filter.

This one’s short and sweet because I’ve said it all before, but it truly is the most important point I wish was obvious. The emotions  run deep and beyond intense. If I overreact, well, it’s because I’m reacting to how big it feels to me. It’s a hard one to understand if you haven’t been there. I can be content being considered a drama queen. Everything is dramatic to me but that’s not all bad. As much as there is, it’s wonderful to feel. You know you’re alive and that’s deserving of big!

Day 20: Expression

How do you usually express yourself?

Let’s see, there’s this, lurking creepily at the cemetery, lurking creepily downtown, lurking…well, I do a lot of creepy lurking. Actually, no, I don’t, not anymore. Ah, the old days. I could also make a bad joke regarding my kid under the heading of breeding monsters, but he’s being a little too sweet today for that. I try to get him in on the self-expression, but so far he’s got his own thing.

Most of my expression now comes with me writing in one form or another, be it here or in my journal (very sporadically) or writing stories that I wish were Gothic. I do create monsters in my stories and actually, in my one finished manuscript I think I came up with some good ones. Oddly enough, most of the things I end up writing are sci-fi or fantasy and God knows I love a good battle scene. I have no idea where any of those things came from. All I want to do is wander the English countryside in a corset writing stories of unquiet souls tormented and longing with some frightening things running through the center of it all. Somewhere some wires got crossed but isn’t that why I’m writing this blog? A lot of my wires have shorts in them, or at least lost their insulation.

Over the years my expression has changed. I began with drawing and painting and then moved on to writing when I  hit the double digits. Later I moved on to music, photography, and graphic art and then came back around to writing. I do a little of all of these depending on where my head is and how much patience I have. I haven’t really painted in years since with my son, it’s a hard thing to get time to do. The same with the self-portrait photography though there’s nothing quite like getting a character out in that cathartic sort of way, by becoming them.

Writing is similar in that way. I can pace and say what they’re saying aloud, figure out how they’re feeling and why they do what they do and in the meantime I get to both become someone else and explore a side of myself and give it voice.  It’s an interesting process.

Today, I was making a piece of art for a friend as a gift. That’s also a nice thing to do. Crafting is a new form of expression for me. I was going to take up knitting to make something hilarious and wonderful for DG, but I really didn’t have the patience for it. I may, if I calm down, give that another try.

For now, I get a wild hair and go with it in whatever form that takes. Maybe I want to do Queen of Hearts makeup and take pictures in that character, maybe I write a story about my dad. It’s all very random but that’s what expression is about to me. You have something that you need to get out and you do, whatever it takes. Sometimes you make something beautiful and sometimes it’s something frightening.

It’s probably the one thing I’d go mad without, creating. Whether it’s lasting or transitory. whatever you make is a reminder to the world that you were here and tells a small bit of your story, your point of view. Everyone deserves to have a piece of themselves seen and understood. There are a million ways to do it, to make your mark. Every one of them is worth your time and energy and who knows, maybe it might even be appreciated by someone who never knew they could do the same thing or how to say something you were able to. It’s all beautiful…the most beautiful thing in the world.