XXX-tremism

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Must you make me laugh so much?
It's bad enough we get along so well.
Say "Goodnight" and go...
- Imogen Heap, Goodnight and Go

I am a person who lives life as an emotional absolutist.

What, you may ask, is that? Well, I answer, it's a term I've sort of made up. But, I think that it says a lot about the way I interact with the things around me. And I'm guessing that there are at least a few other people like me out there in the world, even if they don't know that they too are emotional absolutists. We're people who don't know how to live in emotional shades of gray. We are those who need to put specific labels on specific feelings so that we can specifically deal with them in a specific way. I'm revealing to you, and this isn't easy for me dear readers, that I have a really hard time when I'm not sure how I feel about something.

As a middle schooler, I learned in my "gifted" program about the seven kinds of intelligences as posited by Howard Gardner. Mr. Gardner put forth that people can be "smart" in a variety of ways, seven to be exact. It's a theory which that splits up smarts into separate categories of aptitude and helps to elucidate why person with perfect pitch and the ability to pick up any instrument won't necessarily understand multivariable calculus right away or why a gifted punster might not be able to parallel park. Ms. Kotrba my gifted teacher told my mother in a parent-teacher school conference that I was the first student she had ever encountered who had ever exhibited excellence in all 7 intelligences.

My mother told her she was wrong.

I admit that I have always been a nerdy science geek, so poor Wendy Kotrba's assessment of above average ability in the area of logical-mathematical intelligence comes as no real surprise. I think that I have also always written reasonably well, if overly dependent on form, so we can also concede that the linguistic category wasn't a huge stretch. I sang and played an instrument decently so music was within the realm of possibility. The drive to win at Tetris or arrange my setting in the most efficient manner possible bespeaks my spatial understanding. Ms. Kotrba never saw me dance so I suppose she couldn't have known my body/kinestethic sense was a little off and while everyone deludes themselves to some extent about their own personal strengths and weaknesses I think I have a vaguely accurate understanding about my own personality. However, "Interpersonal Skills," the last intelligence and the one my mother pointed to as a clear indication of my teacher's clear and present delusions of favoritism, has never been a strong suit. Not by any stretch. Some might go so far as to say that I have always "struggled" with this particular hurdle.

I have, in short, never been very good at expressing my emotions or picking up on the meanings of those in others. I was notorious for acting in a manner that bespoke the very opposite of what I was trying to convey. If I felt sorry for doing something wrong I expressed that emotion in anger and frustration at the other person. A real sense of guilt or sadness came out as stony and silent. My warmer moments were at times unexpected or in response to frustration on the part of the intended recipient. Child of an adolescent therapist, I was forced to learn how to substitute actual interpersonal skills for a logical reading system. In place of actual understanding in a direct way why people act the way they do, I have learned to process cues through a semi-logical system that I have been given, something akin to a computer logarithm that inputs signals people are giving me with their body language and outputs emotive expression and meaning. But people aren't all the same or always all that logical, much as I want them to be. Thus, it might be an understatement to say that between the lines communication has never been my strong suit.

Because of this, I often don't trust my interpretations of personal interactions. I tend not to trust my reading of a situation, especially when it falls outside of my direct personal experience. I've had one too many cases in which a person seems to me to be acting in a very specific way only to in fact feel quite the opposite. It's made such an impression that I've defensively developed a habit of adopting rather rigid emotional climates within myself, almost as if I'm doing the world a favor by making my emotional terrain simpler, in the hopes that the people around me will do so in return.

As a teenager early stages of boy-girl interactions made me vaguely green and weak in the knees for the very reason that my social life depended on my ability to play games of interpersonal subtlety. Not to mention that whenever I liked someone I was tortured with the knowledge that I had nil aptitude for figuring out whether they felt the same feelings in kind. Regular people are hard enough to figure out and teenage boys?!? Forget it. Often I would find myself doubting up to and sometimes far after admission of feeling from a suitor. The boy could have positive body signals charged with a car battery, be bent nearly backwards in order to put his hand closer to mine on the arm rest of my chair, they could back-rub, "accidentally" touch my should/arm/knee/thigh a hundred times, make excuses to call and still I couldn't or wouldn't trust myself to read the signs as what I hoped they were.

So while for some the strange and new feeling of kiss-chase would send them soaring, giving them a new found power in the exhilarating limbo, the ecstatic state was for me instead a veritable purgatory. While my peers raced into the trascendant penumbra of courtship addicted to the adrenaline-driven thrill like a first hit of heroin, I found myself stuck in the back seat of the hated vehicle suffering from motion sickness. My sister and I often argued this point, taking opposing viewpoints on matters of the burgeoning heart. I staunchly maintained that the beginnings of an amour simply caused undue and unwanted anxiety. For me the hulking uncertainty of end result was too much stress to bear. I simply wanted to fast forward to a state of stability in which I'd no longer have to worry. If I just knew the person felt the same I could start acting normally again. Dale on the other hand, would often find that once she'd actually caught the prey she'd been stalking that she no longer had much interest in it. "Why do I want something that's now rolled over and died?" she'd counter to my protests.

Thus I have never really believed in the thrill of flirtation, generally amping myself up into such a fit of nerves that I tend to rush past warning signs others might see flashing in bright red and dive right into things head first if only to get them over and done with. I hate so much having to begin something new that I sometimes sabotage myself. Because when I try so hard to force my eggs to hatch before they're ready I end up covered in yolk. The worst part being of course that I am totally cognizant of what I'm doing. I still have a decent sense of intra-personal intelligence after all.

When I first began my foray into online dating I quickly realized that my inclination was simply to meet someone immediately if they passed the basic set of criteria: a Republican-free voting record, an above average respect for higher education and a lack of significant others in the state of Ohio. I didn't want to drag out the get to know you process if it wasn't going to work out. And while on some level I recognized that until you actually get to know someone it's sort of arbitrary to decide whether or not things will work out, I also have a great propensity towards making large sweeping judgments about people on very little info.

"Ok", I hear you saying in reference to the quotes above. "So that explains the Rilke... What about the pop-culture insert?"

Well, here's the deal: I'm getting to the point now where I'm beginning to not only see that my patterns might be the teeny tiniest bit destructive, but that maybe, just maybe, everyone feels a little bit of those queezies when they might have to put themselves out on the line. I'm starting to wonder if maybe my discomfort is just one of those things I have to learn to live with. And while I can't promise I'll ever fully appreciate a leisurely journey to certainty, maybe I can at least learn to tolerate it, if only because it makes the destination a little fuller when you get there and that forcing situations before they're ready means I'm recieving them in an immature state. So I've made a resolution to figure out how to train myself out of the instant gratification I've gotten used to and try and keep my categories a little less absolutely. Blur the labels for my own good.

Because perhaps, just perhaps, there's validity in being one of those who's waiting for all those good things they have coming to them.