Sometimes when I daydream, I picture myself walking down the streets of Cole Valley. But, instead of being in my body as it is, I am a giant version of a pulsing, bloody, dripping organ that is the human heart, just strolling about the village. Other times in these daydreams, I am a literal rainbow from the waist up, with go-go boots on my somehow still human legs and feet. I have electricity pulsing through my R.O.Y.G.B.I.V. colors; each line of chroma buzzing in the way neon gas sounds when it’s called to action in the “on” position around a local watering hole’s pool table. What’s similar in these daydreams, is that I am so ALIVE with emotion. I feel nearly aloft from feeling things that I’m using my tip-toes to swipe at the ground so I can stay gripped to the pavement. I’m being pulled towards the sky like a formerly rain-laden cloud that has released it’s heaviness, and now needs to drift upward to rejoin the more light weight cotton balls that are soaring the skies in unison.

My mind is in nearly constant motion: as I run the track back of a song that has imprinted, as I write stories for myself that won’t make their way to any where outside of my mind, as I observe the people passing by me on the village sidewalks.

There are a few themes that repeat ad nauseam in my life, and I can feel their presence even at the very start of my memory-tape playback capabilities. Each personality trait, like most things in life, is viewed as positive or negative, dependent on how it’s framed. According to feedback, solicited and otherwise, one of the aforementioned themes is how I am/can be: too sensitive, too emotional, a lot, a force, a stubborn woman, someone who at times speaks confrontationally before pausing to consider the words about to come out of her mouth.

I used to feel genuinely horrible about these “overly emotional” traits of mine. I wanted, in a painfully aching way, to turn myself in to the kind of person others referred to as stoic, or imperturbable. The burden of feeling like a real live emotional wire becomes almost too much to bear at times. There are moments when I wish I could mute my empathetic tuning fork, and simply slide in to a costume of someone who has been coated in apathetic Teflon. I have worked with people who seem to have this coating, and until a few years ago I spent loads of hours trying to train myself on how to feel less in the moment. I dreaded when I publicly cared about something that seemed out of synch with the ways others were reacting. Why, I wanted to know, could I not just chew on my inner cheek for a bit longer and make myself move past the part where I felt my feelings in front of others whom I knew I was making uncomfortable?

Fortunately, one of the best things about turning forty, starting a regular therapy practice, and having an emotionally supportive partner and kid is that I’ve realized something. These big feelings aren’t my achilles heel or kryptonite, but are in fact, my actual super power. It is a gift to cry with friends when they are telling you about a very hard time they are having. It is a life-affirming activity to laugh until you almost throw up with another human; especially because it started off as something kind of funny, and then it gets funnier, and funnier, and funnier to watch each one of you find it so hilarious. Then, oh shit, before you know it there we go making gagging sounds because we laughed so hard we goose-honked and will spend the next ten minutes paying the price via coughing.

It is an honor to have someone tell you a story about how they felt wronged, and to throw your hands in the air with them and say something along the lines of, “well fuck that person and fuck that shit, you deserve better”. It’s hard sometimes to FEEL so much, so deeply. It is an emotionally technicolor world where I live and it took me my lifetime-to-date to realize it, but I don’t want to be less… I want to be me, big emotions and all. I’m kicking off 2023 by throwing my arms around my huge emotions and listening to this and this on repeat/repeat/repeat/repeat.