That’s what people say about the holidays. What matters is what you give other people, not what you get in return. Maybe if giving season was only once a year, this would be true. But I think some people live in an eternal giving season. I think I might be one of those people.
Kati was the first and only person to ever tell me I gave other people anything. “You give and give to people,” she wrote in the letter she gave me on my sixteenth birthday. I remember reading that and thinking, I have never felt like I give anyone anything. I’m terrible at being there when people need me to be, and in most cases what I give people is sensory overload from being around too often. To be fair, Kati misjudged me sometimes. In that same letter, she wrote that I taught her to “put the gas mask on yourself before helping anyone else,” and I don’t believe I have ever adhered to this rule. I could be beyond exhausted, literally on the verge of tears, and I would drag myself out of bed to play card games with people I’ve known for two months. And most of the time I do that because I know that being around other people, even if it’s occasionally irritating, will always be more interesting than going to sleep or doing one of the seven billion class readings I never seem to catch up on.
I couldn’t help but wonder tonight why I am that way. It has made me angry for the longest time that other people aren’t like that. Even back home, I remember friends turning down offers to try to sneak into clubs or run around the golf course at night, and I could never fathom why and it made me so angry. I can’t tell if now I’m actually growing emotionally and beginning to understand that maybe other people aren’t as captivating to everyone else as they are to me. Maybe, when my friends don’t want to do something one out of the seven nights in the week, it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Is this maturity? I don’t know. Theres a good chance I’m just growing numb to the anger.
I think at some point we just grow numb to every possible emotion there is to feel, and we call that maturity. “Personal growth” is when I don’t feel rage, but instead feel disappointment. It’s when I stare out the car window thinking, mindlessly driving might be the most pleasant experience I’ve had in a month, and I feel like I should be more angry but I am not.
What if children are the only people fully experiencing life? What if those new, high intensity emotions are the only reality there is? And all we do is experience them so much we start to go numb and we call this growing older? I can say that most days, I’m glad I don’t feel black-hole anger like I used to. It takes so much for me to get blindly angry, to the point where I blame everyone, and when I do I feel that way it makes my life feel dark and twisted in a way it hasn’t for years.
Maybe emotional numbness is a good thing. Maybe life is slowly slipping by and speeding up because there is not so much to hold on to anymore. If there’s only so many emotions on earth, at what point does it matter what we experience anymore? We’re feeling the same things. Loss, regret, anger, love, grief, sadness, excitement liveliness, happiness, joy, pain. What happens when there are no more emotions to experience?
I like to pretend that if things ever got boring I would fly to Iceland and hike a glacier, or take the LSAT. Some of the kids I’m in school with laugh at me because I can’t decide between taking Acting or Data Science, and sometimes I want to drop everything and go to art school, or drive back to arches and see if it’s as bad the second time around. People are always shocked that I don’t have a direction, but I don’t really get the point of trying to plan for anything serious like that. Plans are disappointing and upsetting because 99.8% of the time things don’t happen the way you want them to, and usually people bail and things fall apart and the things you thought you could do you no longer can, and none of it really matters anyway because for all we know being alive is a fabricated experience.
I need a lot of things to be going on around me to feel anything at all, otherwise I start to slip into space. Sometimes I give other people the ability to make me feel boring, which I don’t really comprehend because I get so bored with everything around me that I’m constantly reinventing it in my mind to make it more interesting. And still, other people get to pick and choose when they find me interesting and when they find me to be too much.
I don’t know how I feel about that. I feel less and less in general every day, as I become more and more numb to all the emotions I’ve already felt a thousand times over. Maybe I will never go to law school or get to walk on the moon, I probably couldn’t do anything to help cure alzheimer’s before my father can’t remember who I am. I might never get a photo published in national geographic, or marry someone I’m meant to be with. I’ll probably take the easy way out at every challenge I encounter and settle for whatever works then and there. I’ll probably never do half the things I want to do. I can’t make other people see me the way I want to be seen, I couldn’t make someone fall in love with the way I think, and I’ll probably never fully work through all the things that have happened to me because time doesn’t stop and more things keep happening and eventually you just give in to feeling numb about all of it.
Perhaps, in the end, this is what Kati meant when she said I give and give to people. I can’t help it. At some point, I’m not even giving to anyone else in particular. I’m just the kind of person who is always overflowing with things I have no place for, good and bad, and other people just happen to be there a lot of the time because I can’t seem to stop being around them. I’m not sure if I can call it giving when it really is more like bursting at the seams with thoughts and feelings and memories that never go away.
I wonder if she thought that one day, when I couldn’t sit in the passenger seat of her car and let all of these ideas take up the space in the air around us, I’d resort to letting my thoughts spill over into a corner of the internet no one sees. I’ll never be able to ask her what she meant. And even that phases me less and less with every passing day.