1/13/25

There comes a time in most everybody's lives in which they find themselves unable to stop fixating on a certain thought, feeling, or most troubling, person. In my own, this issue has most commonly manifested in the way of romantic situations, often getting to a point where my own inability to stop thinking about it is more upsetting than what happened to catch my attention too firmly in the first place. The logical and most common response to this kind of fixation is typically the forceable consumption of a rather hard pill; that I simply need to get over it. However, while I certainly can be a particularly difficult case when it comes to these kinds of problems, considering the vast amount that the issue of "not moving on" seems to impact people, it seems to be something more than a problem I alone have yet to discover the solution for. Occurrences like a break-up, moving out of an important apartment, a particularly challenging fight with parents, or a harsh middle school bully are things that, while the majority of the human population of dealt with to some degree, are also typically ones that invoke intense emotions from the time they occurred, to years later. But what happens when years have passed, and the recollection of the memory still feels like salt on an open wound? Where do we put the feelings that have overstayed their welcome, and no longer have a need to be stored in the lives we live today?

 Since I was as young as I can remember, I've felt every emotion at the very peak of its definition, which at the young age I was when I first become described as the "emotional one" was a lot of emotion for a young boy to feel. But one way this manifested itself was the way in which I felt about others. I would go through phases of what was essentially infatuation. More often than not, the people at the receiving end would typically not be the friends I was already closest to, but a more casual friend I would suddenly be all-consumed with adoration for. I would want to spend every waking moment with them and think about them even more than that. The first time I remember experiencing this intensity of fondness for someone was in second grade, for a girl who continues to be my friend today. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I would have afterschool care in the daycare of my grade school for a few hours while my sister had basketball practice. On one random Thursday, this girl came with me, and we spent the entire hour and a half together doing whatever it was to keep two 8-year-olds entertained. When I went home that day, I found myself thinking of her differently than I had before. What I now can recognize as something that was, in reality, a budding friendship, was misconstrued in my deeply emotional prepubescent mind as a deep-seated love for this girl I had never seen in the light the way I did now. I couldn't bear to keep my feelings inside, and the moment I got home, for the first time in my life, I asked my Dad to use his landline to call her house and ask for a playdate. That night, I took a piece of paper, and a crayon, and wrote "I love her so much" and hid it deep within my toy bin, hoping to hide the genuine love I felt for my friend away from anyone but myself. By the time I awoke the next morning, no such feelings remained, only the sheer excitement I felt for the playdate I had now set up for the following weekend. But at the time, my teeny tiny eight-year-old brain was so moved by what I thought I felt, I simply had to put pen to paper, a physical manifestation of the sheer amount of love bubbling inside of me for the new long-lasting friendship I had just found. The unfortunate thing about maturing, is that experiences like this become learning lessons as we age. I learned to distinguish what the love felt for a friend was from the love felt for someone romantically, much less that girls were typically not on the receiving end of the latter. However, and as equally unfortunate, age also taught me that a simple notepad and writing down whatever feeling is currently coursing through my mind is not always as simple a solution as it was at eight years old. 

When I first began experiencing the alternative, more harsh emotions related to what loving something or someone actually felt like, it was just as much of a learning lesson as it was 14 years ago. To me, it seemed like the adult thing to simply write it down and wait for the feelings to other consume me, or dissipate as they had so many years ago. The key difference between then and now was, the love I felt in second grade manifested into friendship, but the love I felt now had nowhere else to go. I could write it down as often as I wanted, but so long as they existed in person, my feelings persisted inside, and there was nothing I could write to therapize myself into accepting the reality of the fact; that the feelings would never be anything more. The next best, and most adult thing I could muster was to verbalize such feelings to the next of kin - in this case, the friends we had in common - in hopes that it would allow some alleviation of, if nothing else, the stress that keeping it to myself was causing me. The only downside to this scenario is that, unlike the ongoing onslaught of thoughts and emotions seeing them everyday causes, they all sounded the same when relayed, and after a certain point, everyone gets just as exhausted with them as I was having to hear them in my own voice echoing throughout my every thought. So as time passes, my only option is to continue to grow, and therefore process new ways of managing the sheer amount of emotion that carries too much power to be stored away for safekeeping. Eventually, it grew too loud to do anything but the very last resort; tell them. When the emotions become too much to bear, and all other alternatives have been exhausted, the only option remaining is to attempt at closure - a resolution, even if it's not the one I want, but at least one that will give me enough confidence to say I did everything I could and try to process it enough to take the power away. 

Confessions of love are something every child endures, but as an adult, it feels past its prime to seem an excusable way to handle things. As adults, we expect each other to handle things on our own, and placing such strong feelings in the hands of those most likely known to want nothing to do with them feels more selfish than righteous. So we grow old, god forbid letting any of these things inside to this point, and let the things we never said either resolve themselves or boil deep within us, presenting themselves in the faces and friends we see reflecting their faces years later, rearing the emotions we told ourselves we were over years before. Things like love, jealousy, hate, lust, nostalgia, sadness, and fear, are emotions that very few things can fully resolve outside of what we can do for ourselves, let alone given the boundaries we place upon ourselves for the appropriate ways to handle them. For those who feel them so strongly that they linger on their skin until it feels like its rupturing, Id recommend starting a blog. Otherwise, we will continue to carry the baggage we may not even know we continue to bear, and simply hope that someday they can only return as a memory we had forgotten why we cared so strongly about.