Emotive Babbling

Nothing intellectual, just a diary entry in preparation for tomorrow's biochemistry examination.

:

I've been feeling better lately.

I'm just now catching up to some of the things I've left undone for a long time.

Recently, I've had greater resolution and emotional strength than I could previously muster.  That means I have been able, once again, to plunge myself completely into my studies and work.  Now I can encompass all of the thought processes that are necessary for me to find my way.  I can do things that would have otherwise required too much energy.  I am thinking positive thoughts, I'm having new ideas.

I'm out of the rut.

Mostly.

It's not yet perfect, but it's significantly better.  I am gradually exploring what the future has in store for me, which is necessary because of the immensity of what I'm considering as my set of possibilities.  Each thing that I want to do is enormous, and I can't do it by myself in a single lifetime.

So my debacle is this:  do I set out to do as much as I can to further each of those ambitious potentialities, in earnest and without giving a second thought, or do I step back and consider which of those things I can do?

I think that the answer is that I simply don't know enough to rule out possibilities.  And the cost/benefit analysis, if everything is possible, pushes me towards the most difficult option.

...I wonder if even I will be able to understand what I've written here in a month's time.  Cryptic non sequiturs and emotive babbling.  Ideally, they'll be enough for me to keep track of my life in retrospect, but not enough to convey much of meaning to the observer.

Flipping Feelings

After watching a TED talk about how unhealthy it is to believe that stress is unhealthy, I've been wondering how many negative feelings are really just the malperceived counterparts of some positive emotion that we can take advantage of and be fulfilled by.  If redefining how you look at stress can physiologically change the body's stress response to one of courage, then how many other responses are there that can be perceived in a new kind of light?

Another thing I've been wondering is if there's some convenient way to transition from one emotion to another, leapfrogging from feeling to feeling, to lead one's self out of a state they wish to escape.  It's nearly impossible to think away a feeling, and going from something like misery to ecstasy is just unfeasible for somebody who's crippled by longstanding unhappiness.  But maybe it's plausible that I could work out a strategy for making myself bitter instead of depressed, angry instead of bitter, indignant instead of angry, and courageous instead of indignant.  I am coming up with various things to do during the good spell that I'm in now.  It's so much easier to think of solutions to problems like these when you're not experiencing the problems.  And by now I realize that the weeks of normalcy have no meaning to my chronic disposition.

I'm curious to flesh out this hypothesis.  I'm sure that there are meditation techniques for doing this kind of thing?  Perhaps.

Current feelings:

~A good week.  I've noticed depressive auras nearly overtake me, and I've certainly been agitated because of deep-seated frustration about my lot in life.  But I've been able to numb my mind just enough that I could block the thoughts which depress me.  I haven't been indulging in spontaneous, spurious feelings.  So that's been okay.

~I take solace in seeing myself as not merely an animal with feelings, but an agent with dreams.  I have things to do and I have time to do those things.  I can't nearly fit all of the things I want to learn into my 4 years of college, and I have to delay the experience of certain aspects of my youth until I simply have more time to explore what I should have while younger.  I have to accept this and simply let it be.  I want to make my college experience a positive stepping stone for a life of learning what others have discovered and exploring the universe on my own terms.