Sure it does. Nice try Huw. Now let us be real. Opening myself to a possible deluge of positive emotions, a chance at a connection, opening the channels to an emotional bond with another comes with it a downside. Even the process of opening up and maintaining a consistent and honest possibility in myself for this to happen is a rush of positive feelings in itself. So here comes the tide, with waves that crash all around me, on a previously calm and quiet beach... This access to a range of feelings that I have lived without has unleashed a maelstrom of uncomfortable possibilities along with it. The tiniest imagined slight or minor failure of communication results in a cascading torment of difficult feelings. The fear of failure, the worry of a lack of mutuality to my emotional risk, even worrying if my narcissistic worries that I am at the center of the misunderstanding, gnaw at me and make me suffer. "Sit outside" these feelings and "see myself through them"? Um, how about struggling to maintain some sort of composure, attempting not to let them undermine what I am hoping might grow, these I can try, but to actually manage them the way I described in that other essay? The way I tried to make it sound so easy? They are feelings, not bits of news lying on the kitchen table. They will have their way and I will have no choice in the matter! So does this make me insecure? Maybe. Hypersensitive? Just sensitive, I hope. Human? Well, yes, definitely. I may wish to spend a lot of time here writing these files as if I am some Buddha on a mountaintop gazing out over all of existence, but let this serve as a little reminder that I am also just a man, a man with feelings that defy comfortable predictability (to me at least) and management (as if I would ever really want to manage them!). When the chemicals come to visit my brain, what choice do I have but to follow their intricate paths through my past failings as well as successes? They make a mockery of my sense of self, and leave me tormented with the fear that they will alter it long enough to steal my dreams and leave me with nothing but another dry, intellectual set of ideas to report on. Let us all hope this will not be so, and in the longer run please forgive me the hubris that sometimes I can live above or outside myself. 10/22/00 - 3 AM 
© Huw Powell
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