It just occurred to me that people who try to hide their feelings are actually pretty creepy.

And I would include myself in this category for the moment, but not because I feel creepy so much as what it must be like for others to encounter it. What’s going on when i’m trying to hide my feelings?

Obviously, as a kid, I had to do this in order to avoid getting assaulted… but just the general principle where you feel like you have to hide your feelings…

And the problem isn’t that you decide upon “appropriate” displays of emotion, I don’t think… it’s that when you get to the point of hiding your emotions from others, they still find a way to come out, to manifest themselves.

This occurred to me when i got a reply to an email this morning and I don’t think I could really say what it was the sender of this email was feeling.

In any case, I think back to when I was a kid… and my father was a big “fan” of hiding his feelings until they spilled over as rage. I’m not saying it was something he enjoyed but it was certainly something that worked for him, something that was better for him than facing whatever feelings he was bottling in.

Oh and of course… my mother’s the same way, really. She doesn’t express nor explore her feelings but tries to hide them until she also spills over with rage.

So, in my experience, if somebody is hiding their feelings from themselves, they’re actually quite dangerous… or, at the very least, unstable.

And of course… the more access I have to my emotions, the more of a threat I become to my parents, even as a little kid. Not that I had any means at my disposal to threaten them but my raw emotional experiences threatened their tenuous grasp on the lid that bottled their own feelings of pain, anger, fear, and sadness. So… they attacked me for it.

I’ve been noticing more lately, in slight degrees, just how other people hide their feelings… and I’m starting to see it within myself.

Confronting a father…

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14.8M 21:35

Of course… now I’m wondering if I was incurious about my own experience at the time.

New Trusted Content: Next Step

After listening to the Nihilism series at FDR (Video and Bronze+ podcasts), I realized that I was at least something of a nihilist, in practice, without even knowing it.

The event I point to is the Sunday show right after Universally Preferable Behavior came out, in which I basically said of the book, “It’s nice,” or “It’s interesting.” I remember that feeling excitement (or, rather, anything) about the book was difficult, and it took me a number of months before I finally had a moment where it suddenly made sense, consciously.

Prior to FDR (and certainly for a while afterwards), I basically lived in a world where there were no absolutes, everything was opinion, and everything was a sales job. I just don’t think I had quite intellectualized it to that point, but was just living from moment to moment at that time. That is, I couldn’t explain why I didn’t believe, I just didn’t. When challenged, I seized.

The religiosity in my past was exceptionally nihilistic in terms of my desire for moral behavior being used to control and attack me, and though I hadn’t intellectualized it, I definitely put morality into an entirely relativistic category. As part of my deconversion from Christianity, I took my cues about behaving morally from the parts of my culture that I liked (which included “sex is not sinful” but also “taxation is moral, but not too much”).

Of course, the moral relativism wasn’t borne completely out of religiosity as my parents were not overtly religious my entire life. My father only became overtly religious at some point in my mid-childhood, in which the whole set of moral rules suddenly changed. Now, attending church was “good,” not wanting to attend church was “bad,” where before there was no moral category regarding attending church whatsoever.

There are more examples but I am a bit pressed for time at the moment. Thanks for reading!

I have a number of musical influences, but one of them is church music. There’s something about the sound of an organ that I really do like. If you can’t stand the sound of church organs, then you will probably want to skip this one.

The name is kind of sarcastic… nothing else came to mind, though.

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2.1M 3:04

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