Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life--to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.
And extremes--whether of dullness or fury--successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies--unconscious strategies--to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too--sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.
It takes courage to feel the feeling--and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?
I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.
Tags: life anger feelings avoidance living-life suppression extremes inadequate
I didn't know how to say goodbye. Words were stupid. They said so little. Yet they opened up holes you could fall into and never climb out of again.
Ann RinaldiTags: words war goodbye inadequate 1788 ann-rinaldi
The brain has only three functions: open, closed, or deprived.
Anthony LiccioneTags: brain open-minded lacking inadequate deprived closed-minded unbeneficial
I was a terrible dancer. I couldn't carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over. I couldn't ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn't speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese. I didn't even know where most of the old out-of-the-way countries the UN men in front of me represented fitted in on the map.
For the first time in my life, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
Tags: inadequate
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