a vision of a child returning

I’m feeling angsty today. I have more days like this than I’d care to, where I’m just on edge and can’t seem to shake it. It took me a long time to realize I was an anxious person. I came from what is now obvious to me as an anxious family, but growing up I just kind of took my family’s behaviour to be the norm. There’s this smile that my mother makes that screams, “I’m supposed to be happy,” but is obvious to me as a sign of tension. It looks a bit like someone dealing with the extra Gs of re-entering the atmosphere, and probably feels a bit like that too. I realized when my parents visited that I can feel their emotions. My wife has a hard time reading them, and I do too sometimes, but there are also times when I just know what it feels like to be them. Like when my mom is worried she’s offended someone. I know how hard that hits her because it hits me that way too. I just can’t stand it, and I’ll ruminate over it for longer than is healthy. My family very much taught each other to hide their emotions. This would be fine if we were good at it, but the emotions squeeze out the sides in often non-functional ways, one of which is giving up on things and another of which is self-medication. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to not be anxious, to have the same frontal cortex (the most uniquely human part of the brain that does a lot of cognitive work) but a different limbic system (largely related to emotion). The truth is I have felt like that at times, but for too brief a period and at too high a long-term cost. Tomorrow I’m going to get back to running, which was interrupted by vacation and the now waning cold. I think I’ll feel less angsty after a couple days of that. I hope so.