June 26, 2013 by

Happiness. Sadness. Anger. Grief. Depression. Anxious. Excited. Nervous. Afraid. Disappointed. Frustrated. Annoyed. Content. Dread. Hopeless. Triumphant. Proud. Uncertain. Ashamed. Embarrassed. Guilt.

What are those? Well, obviously they're all emotions/states of being. There are more, of course, but that's beside the point. We all know what it's like to be physically numb, right? Well, the same can happen emotionally. I don't mean the kind of numbness that stems from being desensitized to something or whatever. I'm talking about being in a state that leaves you no longer feeling anything. There are some points in our lives in which that can sound appealing. I definitely understand the desire to turn it all off. In the end, though, it's not better.

I don't know why I remember specifically when this happened. It was Memorial Day Weekend during my junior year of high school. We had four days off. During those four days, for some reason I never figured out, emotions ceased to exist for me. I knew it intellectually, which kind of made it even weirder. I was completely aware of it yet I couldn't actually feel anything in regards to it. That was the whole point.

I know what it's like to grieve. I know what it's like to feel depressed for an extended period of time (albeit not depressed in the chemically imbalanced way). But also knowing what it feels like to not feel anything, it's really not any better. The idea of temporarily turning off your emotions may seem like something you'd want, but I wouldn't recommend it. Even if you could conceivably do that, the emotion that you didn't want to feel would just come right back when you turned it all back on because you never dealt with it in the first place. In the midst of negative emotions, you can still remember and feel positive ones, which you quite obviously can't do if you feel nothing. That's the big difference.

I may lack empathy and guilt and all that; I may have dulled emotions compared to the average person; I may think logic is more important when it comes to arguments and issues than emotions (because it is)... But even I know that life isn't worth living without emotions.

One of the reasons Angel is my favorite show of all time is because of its superb writing. It's quite quotable, and I've definitely used quotes from it before. A couple of particular ones relate to this subject:


Fred: "You're right about all of it except for one thing. What we did...I felt it. Every bit of it. And you know sometimes when I allow myself to think about it, it eats me up inside."
Gunn: "Yeah, me too."
Fred: "Well I don't know about you, but I'd take that over being a shell any day."

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