The More and Less Emotional

I am re-reading How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti for the fifth time (in print). I both accidentally and purposefully return to this book annually, approximately. A year was rounding up and then everything collapsed, so I bought my dozenth copy (approximately).

Mainly, I was searching for an early two pages. They struck me in college, and they’ve been haunting me since July.

“Then one day, without warning, the air pressure dropped. The feeling was just gone. I had done nothing to make it go. I looked about me, relieved. But it was only a pause, for then began a building-up, a feeling worse than what had come before, like I was about to hurtle through space and time, like I was a rock that had been placed into a slingshot, drawn back to that August and held there. Then the hand let me go.

I felt the blood inside me gathering fast, the pulse drum up in my ears, my skin grow tense and cold, like I was pushing through the atmosphere too fast. My body was filled to bursting with dread, the anticipation of something I did not know, and an equal resistance overtook me—I wanted nothing more than to stave off this terrifying end to which I was hurtling, which I saw in my head as some kind of pain, and which was accompanied by a phrase that went through my head, over and over again: Punch yourself through a brick wall, punch yourself through a brick wall.

One evening, I saw what the brick wall was: my marriage. A tension came over me, an unbearable feeling of just wanting to get it over with. The wall was there: the pressure could only be released one way. I sat on my hands the entire day, but inside I was hurtling through space and time like a rock, and I told myself not to see anyone—not to speak to anyone—but when my husband lay down beside me that night, I turned over and said, as though I had thought it all through, considered his side, and was making a thoughtful decision: ‘I cannot be with you anymore.’

He’d had no sense of the storm clouds that had been building within me, and when he slammed out of the room, the storm clouds burst into rain, and all over my face and body was the cool wet of relief.” (p.44-45)

But there’s an earlier quote I substituted in conversation:

“This was the central preoccupation of her life when I arrived because it was the more emotional.” (p.6)

I called New Year’s boy twice last week, crying. The first call—two hours long—when he asked how life was and I refused to answer, I met in the middle. I am going through a lot at the moment. It’s not the worst time of my life. I’m just stressed about a lot.

In the second call—one hour long—I tried to explain, uncharismatically, that he is the more emotional.

I think about how I said I think things work out when they’re meant to, I think decisions like this are final, I don’t think we’re getting back together, and I would get back with you now but I don’t think you want to. Nothing untrue, nothing in full. The preoccupation of the moment.

I haven’t really cried since. A wash of balm applied. I stuck out my arms, and I understand why they’re empty. I expected them to be empty.

Delayed, we’re both going to be okay.

The less emotional rises to the foreground, except I tell myself it’s less emotional because the emotions are impossible to sort.

I moved, and as experience warned, the foundation is unsound. I have a coworker who upon every opportunity, warns about living with friends (as if that helps), and I am living with friends. I was going to live with friends well before she started taking toll. The emotional problem is the same: abandonment. The two of them are closer. I knew it. They know it. One said it.

I knew it, but I thought they knew me. I thought they cared more. I thought there’d be more welcome. There’s tolerance, but not to this bandwidth. I tried to tell them, but I think there’s misinterpretation. I don’t know how to say it again. So, I live with it. Like everything else, I try to swallow it. It’s just the more emotional, not the practical.

My mother would say I don’t have my priorities in order.

I’m sorry I only meet you midway too.