self control, my old friend and my oldest enemy
Self control, my old friend and my oldest enemy.
I think of myself as deeply self controlled. Everything about me is persistently and carefully attuned to the environment I’m currently existing in: my moods, the way I speak, how much I express my authentic self.
This is not a unique feature; I know others do this as well. I’m a much more lively and expressive person inside my head. On the surface, I’m calm and collected, peaceful, nearly expressionless at certain points. I’ve been called mysterious at many different points and I do sincerely think that is an insult, or at least there’s a sting behind it, as I would never be as mysterious if you had perhaps asked me any personal questions.
But there is a liveliness within me that hardly ever makes its way to the surface. It bubbles out in spurts of childishness and joy, but in every other aspect I am incredibly guarded and my actual range of emotion is hidden. Because my anger is violent and bitter and unpleasant and I’m not fond of unleashing it on others, unless I am in a particularly antisocial mood. My sincerest apologies to my dear ones, since I tend to have a more lax grip on the emotional reins around them, for better and for worse.
My sorrow and grief are equally unpleasant, but that’s mostly just for me I suppose. I cry easily, as many things that go wrong feel like emotional gut punches. I cry as much when I’m angry as when I am sad, and the angry crying is much harder to control unfortunately. And I hate that. I hate how vulnerable and hysterical I feel, I hate how much attention I get, how disruptive I am, but I do cry a lot and it’s hard for me to stop, especially when I’m angry.
So most of my self control is dedicated to keeping a tight rein on my emotions, because they get easily imbalanced and it’s horribly inconvenient for me, so I try my best to keep them in check.
But I also hold a tight rein on my thoughts.
I’ve known for a while that I think differently than most other people and due to a severe lack of interest in constantly explaining myself, I hardly ever express my real thoughts unless I think it may be funny to do so. And even then it will occur in very particular situations. I’m mean in my head, and many of my thoughts are annoyed or frustrated, and those can be funny, but I’m not about to be consistently mean out loud, because that’s just not the character I want to give off. I temper this all with sarcasm, and I am quite meanly sarcastic often, but there’s a balance.
This is all intentional. I mean to do all of this. I don’t want to let myself out, but I resent it. God, I resent it. Is that surprising? That I’m equally the enforcer and the prisoner. I mean I could just stop. But somehow that’s even more terrifying. I don’t know what will happen, what will pop out.
To be fair, I do tend to be impulsive, and perhaps that’s why I have such tight self control, because I’m not prepared to let myself run completely wild. I’ve consistently had the problem of my body deciding to do things, things that aren’t particularly great, and then my mind eventually catches up and just regrets every single choice I made. Or vice versa. It’s the forgetting I’m an actual human person, and forgetting the physical consequences for my actions that ends up causing me problems, so everything has to be overthought, because otherwise it wouldn’t be thought about at all, and that’s when I tend to get sloppy, or when I have to clean up other people’s messes, and that’s my least favorite consequence.
Self control, I do hate you sometimes, but thanks for looking out for me, I suppose.
~nan