Selfhood

My childhood comprised almost entirely of a bone-deep, existential-scream level of boredom.

So I was one of those kids who people joked would read the whole library.
I did not, but maybe it was close in the YA section.
I would check out six–eight books at a time and finish them in a week.
But then I would just be told by teachers that I must be lying when they would check my reading log.
It wasn't until high school that my ability to consume and produce literature was clocked as anything even remotely approaching good.

So things were emotionally austere.
But I'm a watercolor artist with emotions.
I am tuned to emotions like they're my art form.
I love to wash the field with my emotional signature.
I just want everyone to be happy being who they really are.
I want to get to know everyone's inner child better than I know them.

But the thing is, everyone else's emotions also paint me.
I feel what everyone feels.
I absorb all of their energy — even if they don't know that I do, and even if they don't know that emotion can leak into the field at all.
I know when people are insecure, when they're anxious or stressed, or when we're talking about the one thing that truly makes them happy.
Sometimes I even know what they're feeing before they say it out loud.
That's the sensitivity level I'm calibrated to.
But if there's no emotional energy in the field, I feel starved.

I get ravenous. I get feral.
I want something interesting to happen so bad that I try to tip the universe's scales in my favor.
I live for the drama.
I want to feel the magic of being engaged with something, anything different or complex. Something novel.
I want to feel the dimensions, the shape, the weight.
I want to know things down their atoms.
Once I know all the pieces and the actions, I know the entire subject.
I can paint in that medium too.

That's my learning style.
Total subject matter assimilation.
Self/object fusion.
I am the topic and the topic speaks through me.

It's like I'm a void sometimes.
All I'm doing is finding the resonant signal and scraping away at the noise holding the true shape back.
It's like I'm removing distortion.
Like I'm making you more honest just by being more honest myself.
You pass through me burned down to your frame, but you liked it. You're better now.

And I like doing that. That's my favorite hobby.
But I guess people don't always want to be tuned.
They just want to be held.
And I'm learning that now.