A Cure for Alexithymia

Somewhere in the dark there is always a sickening voice calling us. We never hear it. It just knocks on our hearts, constantly trying to pull us away from contentment. Each knock chips away a little more resolve than the last one, weakening each tightly-bound fiber. It is not until the final strand of fiber breaks loose that everything finally falls apart in its entirety. For a split second everything simply pauses; a single note ringing out like a physical heart flatlining.

And then the explosions come.

I've never been fully alexithymic, and yet personal confessions always come easiest when played in a lyrical form in front of sixty-odd people or blurted out on the internet in front of potential hundreds of friends and family members or billions of English-speaking strangers. There's something comforting about the fact that people may not even see what's written. Or if they do, and/or if it's in a song, that the personal application may not be immediately obvious.

Don't kid yourselves.

It's true for everyone that each song, poem or emo journal entry, no matter how stylized and stereotypical is usually not simply a song, poem or journal entry. No one writes sad songs if they aren't sad. If someone writes suicidally, it has to have come from somewhere.

The problem is, we live in a culture where these things are taken for granted. As though they are simply things that affect humanity in general, but they could never touch our loved ones. As if there's no way my friends could have felt suicidal even once in their lives. As if it's in no way plausable to suggest that our own siblings might (from time to time) have taken a knife to their wrists for any of the many reasons why people do such things. And I'm speaking here strictly as someone who's mood has been known, on occasion, to shift entirely out of the realm of reasonable explanation as "teenage angst".

I don't even know where this is going.

I just know that this superficial kind of culture is not helpful. It's passively, and even at times actively, harmful. People learn to shut themselves off and fill themselves with emotions so tightly that they are constantly boiling below the surface, but unable to express it. That's where serious conditions such as clinical depression and the various anxiety disorders are born.

I'm just sorry that, for all my bitching, I don't have a viable solution.

Human nature is fundamentally flawed.

Don't get me wrong, I do wish I were not such a cynic. But unfortunately for myself and all who are subjected to my company, I discover more support for this philosophy every time I interact with others.