Emotional Claustrophobia and Constipation: Learning to live in the Present

Sometimes I feel emotionally claustrophobic and other times just constipated. I find that when I try to think about everything at once it gets a little overwhelming. To put this in perspective, I will explain my situation. I am an eighteen year old kid in the summer before I leave for college. I am excited of course but there is so much else there; it would be a lie to simply state that I am excited for college. College will be awesome and I know I will have fun. Heck it'll my the first of many unexpected jumps into an unknown future, and for that I am impatient and I'm excited and I'm prepared, but mostly I'm just ready to jump into something new.

But, what about the life I am leaving. I'm not the best person with change. It isn't the fact that I don't like new things, far from it I find the new interesting and poignant in its place. The part I don't like about change is that fact that I can't go back. You see life isn't a video game, where you can simply replay the parts you like and go back to earlier sections if you want, its not a book you can read over and over again or a movie you can pause (use the bathroom) and restart as you please. Life is forward movement, it moves one way through time, constantly, without pause or reversal. That is what I don't like about change. The inability to go back and relive what is now lost.

Now this is not a mind blowing concept, but it is crazy how much we trick ourselves into thinking that this isn't real. We humans seem so bent on trying to recreate the past we literally shape our entire society around this idea. We honor the past with holidays and celebrations. We recreate fashion trends from thirty years ago. My all time favorite (and by favorite I simply mean the one that currently pops up strongest in my mind) is the way we try to recreate fun times we had in the past again. Couples try and redo their first date when they go to propose and thirty year old men try and return to their glory days in high school when they were the kings of the turf and could throw a football or score a goal half way across the field. Humans may be the ultimate masters of advancing technology into the future (although its hard to call us masters when we don't really have any competition) but for all our advancing we look back to the past an awful lot. We live in the past and focus on these good memories we remember.

Can our memories be trusted though? Were the times really as good as we remember them? Probably not. I remember two weekends ago I was attending a grad party I did not want to be at. While I was there I was fairly uncomfortable and was trying (harder than I had needed to in a long time) to look on the outside like I felt like I totally belonged there, while everything on the inside was screaming "Grab the cake and leave!" I also remember talking to some friends two days after that and recalling the event saying, "Oh, it wasn't that bad...it was actually kind of fun." But that wasn't true! It wasn't fun, it was awkward and the whole time I wanted to leave. So why had I convinced myself that it wasn't that bad? Because after that party I went to another party and that one was fairly fun and so I lumped my retrospective emotions together and created a memory that told me that the grad party I went to wasn't that hellish excuse for an afternoon activity after all. We do these things to ourselves constantly and I know that I have to be both intentional and proactive about making sure that I am practicing this counter intuitive act of remembering things as they really were, not as better or as worse. Some might ask why bother with this process of recreating my memories accurately and why not just live in a world where you remember things as better than they really were, because surely that world would be a happier place to exist in. And that is the reason why right there. Because I don't want to live in this happy fairy land where my past was perfect. I don't want to be ignorant of situations that caused me pain because than I will walk right back into them. Ignorance may be bliss but bliss leads to some nasty surprises (as any disney princess would tell you when reflecting back on their journey to meet prince charming).

So what does all this have to do with the fact that lately I've been feeling emotionally claustrophobic which has lead to a serious bout of emotional constipation? I realized that I wasn't living in the present. Nor was I living in the future or the past. What I was trying to do was live in all three at once. We can't do it, but I was determined. I would look back at all the wonderful times I've had up to this point and all the friends I will be leaving and everything that I enjoy that will change forever, and (regardless of whether my memories of all these events and people were accurate or not) I would feel great emotional loss for myself (and an embarrassing amount of self pity wedged in there too). As a counter act I would argue against myself by looking at the future and every new possible future that lay before me with options to live a life however I wanted it to. This lead to a serious tug-a-war going on inside me between my past and my future, which is where the present would come back in. When things went well I would feel myself pulled toward the excited future side. If something was going poorly I would feel myself pulled over to the in past "bummed about what I was going to lose side". This tug-a-war of emotions produced a two step process. The first part involved suffering from a bad case of emotional claustrophobia; overwhelmed by all the different emotions bombarding my inner psyche I would be unable to deal with them all as I felt myself get trapped and pinned down until I could hardly breathe (metaphorically of course, on the outside there were signs but it wasn't has dramatic as it sounds). This led to an extreme overhaul of the system which would repress all these emotions and produce as emotional constipation of sorts. I would be relatively unable to feel emotions at any substantial level and (much like eating with burnt taste buds) everything I experienced was just sort of dull. I wasn't really there in the moment. Swinging between two extreme sides of a pendulum, I was in an unhealthy spot.

I would not have been able to express that I was dealing with this at the time, in fact I would have most definitely told you that I was fine. I wasn't blind to the fact that I was emotionally in an unhealthy spot but I wasn't able to put words to the root problems. I focused on the surface problems at first. Some people might tell you that to fix a problem you have to go straight for the roots just like a weed or else it will grow back up. While it is extremely important to get to the root of a problem eventually, sometimes you need to clear a way to a place where you can tear out those roots, and that is what I first needed to do. As I worked through the surface issues I slowly realized the bigger issue at hand and through spending the time to analyze my experiences and memories for what they really were, see their influence in my past. See how they were effecting my present insecurities and realize how little impact these things would have on my future. I was able to get to a place where I could reflect and learn from my past and look forward to my future but be okay living in the present. It was not easy and I still find myself thinking irrationally about all sorts of events, but by focusing not on what I am doing but on why I'm doing it I am able to live a life that is emotionally confident and healthy.