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I am all for emotional management. I don't mean emotional repression. Instead, it is about acknowledging what is felt, considering why it is felt, and developing actions accordingly. The goal is to have intentional actions appropriate to the conditions and needs, not uncontrolled reactions to potentially inappropriate emotions. 

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While we can't control having feelings, we do have the opportunity to alter our behaviours. However, we have been encouraged to hyper focus on how we feel without consideration of why we feel, and react immediately without considering the impacts. The increasing incidence and violence of things like crimes of passion and road rage, is an illustration of this degradation in emotional management. 

People often react mindlessly on instinct, but those instincts are poorly calibrated to the needs of the moment. The live in the now mentality seems to negate the understandings of the needs of the now requirements. Our emotions are overpowering us, leading us into inadequate response and unnecessary results. We could do better, but to do so takes work, responsibility and accountability for ourselves. Yet, while we want to maximize our freedom of choose, we choose to be slaves to our emotional master, which cages us, as our own actions are outside if our influence.

Over the years, I have learned to be more rational within my emotional landscape, as my approach in childhood was poor. This hasn't stopped me from feeling, but it has usually slowed down the response time between feeling and reaction. Or, sped up the response time of being able to catch the response before it escapes into word or action. The system often fails, but it is is working better than it was.

However, since the stroke a few years ago, many things changed and the tools I had developed lost calibration and it has been an ongoing and energy intensive job to realign them. Some stroke patients have to learn how to walk and talk again, I have had to learn how to think again. The difference is that there is a clear before state and goal of learning walking and talking again, with transparency into all stages of progress. Learning to think again has a very, very opaque window, yet our thought framework has been with us our whole lives. When the frame collapses, rebuilding is difficult because we don't even know what the structure really looked like before, what was lost, what has been broken beyond repair, or what is actually needed. 

Imagine your own thoughts and feelings that make you feel like you, that feel natural, and then what it feels like and what the consequences are of all of them changing, and losing some of them completely. Where do you start, when you don't know where you were, what you lost, or what you need?

I thought that despite all of this, I was doing pretty well considering. I felt like while it was taking a lot of effort and even though people couldn't fully understand or appreciate that effort, I was coping with it and still managing everyday life adequately. It took a huge amount more energy to be me, but the alternative was to do like many stroke suffers do, and sit down and never get up again.

> That sounds incredibly attractive. 

I would hate myself for it, but it would be a relief to not have to spend all this energy just to survive a basic life. Find a place to rest like one of those sea anemones that eats its own brain, and never moves again. Be thoughtless.

> This is how I feel, so should I act on my feelings?

*Not very inspiring.*

We are meant to accept ourselves, accept what has happened to us - but also expected to keep going, to overcome, to try, to fight - even if nothing useful or impactful can be done. It is quite an interesting cultural position that giving up is not a suitable option. 

Self-worth is an interesting concept to me now, as the self seems to be very little without others to interact with. What is the *self worth* when it doesn't bring value to the world? Does it become self-cost? After all, it *costs* to live and it is resource and energy intensive. Is there a ROI on the spend?

With limited personal resources, I am looking to make maximum impact. The problem is, I don't know where or on what the resources should be spent, and it is very possible that the thing that makes the impact is something tiny, so wide coverage won't do enough, but narrow coverage has a high provability of missing the target. *Aims small, miss small.* But aim large and there isn't enough power to make the necessary impact. The energy dissipates and is ineffectual.

Maybe at the end of the day, none of it matters anyway. We live, we burn resources, we die. The energy that we spend isn't lost, just transformed into something else, somewhere else. Our feelings are then also meaningless, even if they can comfort us through the living phase of the cycle. Yet, it isn't satisfying to look at life this way, because we have evolved to think outside of ourselves, outside of the present moment, and that means that instinct isn't enough, we need purpose as well. We need hope. 

>Hope is in short supply at the moment for me.

I wish it wasn't, but *wishing is hopeless.* Since I don't have a clear path forward and no hope for the future to draw upon, I just have to keep acting on what I think is the right thing to do, even though there isn't a clear feedback loop on whether it is working or not. 

There is no progress bar on my improvement, no way to know of what I am doing is working or not. There is no feedback loop at all, other than my dulled feelings. So all I can do is what I do, ad trust that what I do is good enough.

It probably isn't.


Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]




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