It's Hard to Know How to

feel. Right now I’m experiencing something that is disturbing me at a fundamental level. There is a sense inside me that I ought to be feeling a certain way, which is to say I think I feel pretty bad. Now, the disturbing part is that I’m sure I know if that’s the appropriate way to feel. It is a strange disconnect.

But it always begs further questions doesn’t it? Why do we feel in the first place? Is our emotional or psychological or intuitive feeling any different from a hand re-coiling from a flame, a tongue in the throes of jouissance from some delectable dish manufactured from loving hands, or eyes burning from looking at the sun? Can we separate the way we feel?

Perhaps brain-mapping can tell us things about what parts of our brains feel. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that somewhere, somebody has already strapped a willing test subject to a table, attached diodes to his head, and has screenshot after screenshot of how the brain feels. I guess I’m a generally distrusting person, and I’m sure that these brain mappings have some validity; however, the question for me is how we ought to feel, which is an entirely different thing…I think.

When I get spitting bacon grease on my lightly haired torso, I ought to feel a little sting. When we kill somebody brutally by bashing in their cranium with the broken leg of a coffee table, we ought to feel remorse. When we taste something foul, we ought to spit it out. And yet there are exceptions to every rule: people who cannot feel their skin, sociopaths, and people with no taste.

It’s not an exact proportion, you understand. It’s not like a one-to-one correlation where for every one sociopath there is one person who feels what he ought to, but there are certainly enough of them out there that their level of aberration is at least somewhat suspect. Like they ought to be there. Filling out the an Aristotelian spectrum of sorts, where the two ends would be feeling wrong at the wrong time in the wrong way (either in excess or deficiency) and the mean would be feeling the right thing at the right time in the right way. But, as always, the difficulty here is having the right perspective on where the two ends are so you can have a somewhat vague idea where the mean might be.

Here’s the rub, as the bard once called it: with the conglomeration of events from the past fortnight—including but not limited to exhaustion, financial crises, knifings, shooting, emotional crises, and insomnia—I really ought to feel like I’m losing my mind. My ex-girlfriend’s stalker got stabbed in the kitchen of the restaurant he works at. True story. I have had zero dollars in my pocket and negative funds in the bank for longer than my stomach thinks advisable. A drunk man ran into the wall in front of my house as he was being chased by the police, got out of the car and started unloading a clip on the red-blue-flashing cars around him. It is STILL a not uncommon thing for me to be awake for more hours consecutively than can be contained in a day. Even when I get into bed I have to budget in an extra hour for the time it will take me to fall asleep—and pray to god that’s enough.

But I’m surprisingly comfortable in this place.

I feel most comfortable in a place where things are not making any sense. I feel most alive when I cannot control the future. I feel most at home when I don’t know where home is. I feel most in control when things are spiraling out of control. I feel most sane where it’s farthest away. It all feels most natural.

That’s why I guess it’s hard to know how to feel. I have to take into account how I feel about how I feel. I don’t know how to feel things in a normal way, but I have to trust in my feelings.

Acting. That’s what it is. We’re all acting—in a very stage way. The job of the thespian is to put as much of themselves into this character as they possible can in order for it to come off right. If they don’t invest enough of themselves, the character is rendered flat on the stage. If we don’t give enough of ourselves to the characters we’re playing, they are rendered flat in history. Curiously, thespians change characters sometimes three times in a year. I would argue we do the same in existence.

I have changed characters a couple of times at least, and I’m still looking for that starring role in existence. Consistently strive to be the magnificent man. Question where appropriate. Listen where appropriate. Direct where appropriate. Take direction when appropriate. I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel. He seems inhuman. And we are human, all to human.

I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel.