Emotion Lotion

Much as Grace Jones is a slave to the rhythm

I am a slave to my emotions.

I've always been an emotional person. It's a drag when I'm irrationally angry about something and friends have to bare the brunt of that, but after a long road and some Meisner training, I am mostly cool with my emotions.

There are quite a few folks that are freaked out by other people’s emotions. My guess is that emotions don't necessarily play by societal rules and so there is this fear of being out of control. Or there is a fear of not having a pat response and answer when someone near suddenly lets their emotions flood through a crack in their default personality.

There is certainly also an embarrassment involved with letting emotions fly free (which, honestly, is just another extension of fear). My father, who is ironically just as emotional as me, was so uncomfortable with my being emotional that he would yell at me if he saw it happening. He taught me, much as Robert Smith of The Cure would re-teach me, that boys don't cry.

This unfortunately caused a lot of friction in my little head. I was emotional to begin with, I couldn't help my expressing of sadness or frustration or fear through tears, but now there was the stigma of being a girly boy on top of it to really fuck me up. And as I already had a girly boy reputation, man...

I remember specifically a day back in about fourth grade. I was convinced that this guy Steve was trying to steal away my best friend Chris from me. I was upset and I was scared and I was honestly feeling a little sorry for myself. I sat by myself under a tree and drew sharks in the dirt with a stick. Some friends came, they could tell something was going on, and asked me what was wrong (they were girls by the way. God, I love you ladies). As has always happened, as happens now, when I began to put into words what I was feeling, the emotions came flooding out. I could feel myself starting to cry and I put my head down and tried to control my voice to hide it. But those damn tears ruined my already shoddy ruse, spilling from my eyes and blurring the carefully drawn lines of a great white in the dirt. I remember feeling embarrassed, which is apparently not an emotion that others have a problem with you feeling.

It still occurs today, that little voice that sounds like my dad but now sounds more and more like myself, calling me a pansy at the first detection of tears. My first impulse is to hide them, but luckily most of the time now I can give out a royal, 'fuck that' and let it go.

In fact, I'll just tell you, when Napoleon and Deb high-five after their tetherball game, I get a little teary eyed.