Emotions (Warning: this is a LONG entry!)

There is a young man with whom I am barely acquainted but he has won my admiration and respect. On a different forum, he shared his struggle with emotions. The amount of response surprised me. A lot of different people who are in various walks of life disclosed their own battles with the same thing ~ emotions. It took this young man's courage and perhaps a touch of desperation to encourage others to open up. The result was that some people no longer felt as if they are walking through this battlefield, more commonly referred to as life, alone.

Some people worry because they do not "feel" enough emotion. The word apathetic is used a lot. Others express concern due to a lack of ability to express the emotions that are apparently raging within them.

Then there are the ones like me, who stay on a constant rollercoaster. We experience wonderful and exhilarating highs and then plunge into horrible and devastating lows. I have been thinking about the rollercoaster a lot lately. Mine tends to get its power from a couple of different sources. One of them is people. Not necessarily the moods of the people who are around me, but their response to something I've said or done. This causes huge problems. I'll get an idea and after what I think is careful consideration, I act on it. This makes me happy! I get excited! I am a supporter by nature so whenever I think I'm doing something good, productive and/or helpful it makes me feel terrific. However more often than not, I find out that the people who are going to be effected by my ideas are less than thrilled ~ even after all of the Lady Constance angles are discussed.

It is easier to say it this way: I get rejected. Yeah I know, everyone experiences rejection every day and as far as I know nobody has died from it. It just makes you feel as though you want to. The negative emotions - especially self-pity - are the easiest to fall into and the hardest to pull out of.

And sometimes it isn't rejection at all. It just feels that way. (Hey, this post is about feelings.) From my perspective, the other person should immediately jump on my bandwagon, but for some unknown reason they don't. That confuses me because most of the time I get my brilliant ideas/plans from the input of others. Therefore, my bandwagon should be seen as the most colorful and most desireable one out there. So yeah. It feels like rejection when in the long run it might not be rejection at all. But, the jury is still out on that thought.

Can you guess what might be the other source of fuel for my rollercoaster?....You know what? I'll let you think about it for a little while. I will post a sequel at another time.

~~~~~~~~~~~Ain't I a stinker?~~~~~~~~~~~~~