I’m getting more intentional about my journaling. I’m doubling down my investment into small, consistent actions that will benefit my overall health and well-being.
Recently, in my gratitude journal, where I list 3 things to be grateful for daily, I wrote “Well-written, relatable, messy, passionate characters”.
Currently, those characters are Eva and Shane.
The problem with this is that these characters break me open.
Because they’re relatable, they expose the parts of me I often try to hide from myself. The parts I know exist, that I do love, but I sometimes struggle to love. The messy parts that disrupt my life in many ways, but the messy parts that have made my life beautiful.
(TW) These characters don’t know how to stop. These characters are wildly passionate. These characters appreciate the small beauties of life, but struggle to want to stay active in life. These characters are doused in pain. These characters struggle with substances and having addictive personalities. These characters, whether they have trauma that caused it, or grew up in relatively good circumstances, still struggle with internal factors of dysregulation that impact how they see the world.
But, in spite of this, and a lot times in virtue of this, they experience the world deeply and vividly. That is the most relatable part of these characters. Because they feel things so largely, they feel the bad parts with an overwhelming intensity. And, they feel the good things with that intensity. The smell of a flower is much more emotional. The way the wind blows the trees, while a dragonfly flaps its wings, and the clouds move through the blue sky, is that much more ethereal. You feel the sounds of a well-executed orchestral arrangement of Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” reverberate deep in the muscles of your heart and soul and taste the tears that well up in your throat because of it.
These characters also break me open when they find their equals. Their love stories of partners whose invisible strings bring them together leave me longing for the same feeling. I ping pong between forgetting the world while I’m lost in theirs while also remembering that their world is fiction and in mine, I’ve yet to find my weird, insane, passionate partner who is all in for me.
Either way, I love a book that cracks me open like this. In all of the best ways.
(P.s. I truly feel sorry for those who don’t feel things as deeply. To be so standardly normal and process emotions so minimally seems unfulfilling. If I had to live this life feeling and experiencing things without the same depth and intensity, I’m not sure life would be as beautiful.)
Z's Comfort Zone 