Catching Feelings

Welcome to my world, do come in. Have a seat and please don’t touch the self-esteem, it’s fragile at the best of times. Anyhoo, hi, how are ya? This is the insane asylum that is my mind and today we’re going to have a nice little chat. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you might have guessed that I’m the one who’s done most of the reviews so far, mainly, because it’s easier for me to separate my feelings from my opinions, to a certain degree, so that the review is somewhat unbiased. Emphasis on the ‘somewhat’. I can’t be completely unbiased. But, tangents aside, today’s topic is one I generally avoid discussing. Feelings. Make sense? Probably not to some but to other, yeah, this makes perfect sense. Your feelings are yours to with as you please; some people, like the “emotional crab” have no problem saying how they feel most of the time. I, on the other hand, don’t share feelings much, if at all. I am the two faced bitch of the zodiac, the twins, two starkly different personalities in one brain, both sides of the coin at the same time but double the feelings and they even contradict one another sometimes, hence why I don’t speak about my feelings. So why do I want to share now? Because why the hell not? Soooooo, shall we?

First, I’ll state plainly that I try my best not to be guided by feelings. I prefer logic and evidence before I react to/act in a situation. I endeavour to have a purpose behind all my actions rather than acting because I ‘felt’ it was the right thing at the time. Of course, logic can’t always help and sometimes evidence is scarce then you have no option but to depend on instinct and gut feelings. But why trust a feeling? Why base action on an emotional reaction or a, usually vague, idea or belief derived from a huge variety of factors including mood (unpredictable at best), your circumstances, relationships with people and your current mental state and, let’s be honest, who’s in their right mind 100% of the time? But, regardless of how much I try, feelings are like Thanos…. inevitable.

Feelings is a bit vague really. What I’m interested in talking about is the influence that your feelings have on what you perceive in the world around you. Does it ever strike you as odd that once you realise that there is a person of greater significance in your life (a crush, an infatuation, whatever you want to call it) that everything starts to remind you of them? Songs. Phrases. Bread delivery vans (no seriously, this happens to me regularly in my hometown a variant spelling of a name that keeps appearing in my line of vision). Company names and so on. I’m aware there’s a specific name for this recurring reminder of a single thing but my brain just doesn’t want to supply the right term right now but what I find fascinating is that if this person wasn’t involved, these things and sounds would be completely unremarkable. [Side note: I was referring to the Baader-Meinhof Effect, thank you reddit for giving me the name the day after I finished writing this.] I’d love to understand why we, as people, are drawn to these reminders? Why do they, or at the very least, the thought of these people seem inescapable? In case you didn’t guess, this is kind of happening to me right now and it may or may not be driving me a little insane.

Why does your brain associate words, songs and phrases with a singular person? For me, “Style” by Taylor Swift is a prime example. This song can play at random on my phone or laptop and as soon as my brain registers that it is, in fact, “Style,” it immediately provides not only all the lyrics but the continuous thought of [insert person’s name here]. I know that the brain stores new information with information of a similar kind that already exists in your memory. But that just makes me wonder, how does one person and a song count as similar information? And why can one person hijack the whole memory of a song? What part of us says that’s a good idea? Ah… yes. Feelings….

Feelings are terrifying, if you ask me even though I know you didn’t ask and you could probably already guess, simply because they get out eventually. Either they leak out slowly over time in the gestures you make and the ‘subtle’ things you do around a person or feelings can come out of the blue, blind siding you on some random Saturday. They make you irrationally jealous of the friendships you wish you could have with a person or elated by the simplest kind act. Feelings are like a monkey, pull it’s tail and the monkey throws his poop in the air, the poop hits the moving ceiling fan. It’s on the walls, it’s in every crevice and the best advice I can give you is to keep your mouth shut if you’re are a spectator and if you aren’t…well at least life’s interesting. Whether they are your own feelings or you’re dealing with someone else’s, handle with care. Just think of Newton’s 3rd law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But, in this instance, neither of those reactions are within the realm of your control because above all else, people are predictably unpredictable. Good luck.