Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Touching upon Feelings, Touchy-Feely Style



It’s good to be in touch with your sensitive side they say.  But that often gets confused with being touchy and sensitive.  Being in touch with your feelings is one thing.  But touching upon a feeling or feeling a touch for your feeling (stay with me, now) and fumbling around it like a blind man, presuming to know it based on what tiny glimpse we have or what edge we pass our fingers through can lead to mistaking them. 

Our feelings are not really our feelings but others’ opinion of our feelings.  The information age is also the mis-information age.  And we are unable to hide from it.  Information consists of facts.  Mis-information of opinions.  Nothing is reported opinion free or tinged with subjectivism.  What we feel, how we feel, when should we feel and how to categorize and box them is based on what we see and are told around us.  Every act is labeled by someone already.  And as such, we tend to use those labels whether they be right or wrong.  So infatuation combined with loneliness becomes love, practicality becomes cowardice.

It’s like with music, books and movies.  We tend to lean with the majority reviews.  Hating what we would’ve objectively liked, even if as a guilty pleasure and liking what we did not enjoy, or understand, or both (*cough..Hunger Games, Inheritance of Loss, rap music…cough*).  And so it goes with our feelings and emotions.  We tend to box them into categories described by others.  And we tend to suppress or embrace them accordingly.

So how about this for a resolution.  Not just to be in touch with our sensitivity.  But to not be affected by the sensitivity of the touchiness ascribed by others while being sensible in sensing the depths and touchpoints of our true emotions.  Or something to that effect. 

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