The Color Wheel

I've always liked colors.

I don't consider myself much of an artist, but the concept of the color wheel and its emotional connotations has always interested me. I said once in group therapy that I see people in terms of colors; based on what I know of their personalities, I look at my friends and match them to a color (or a range of colors) on the Wheel. It's fun and surprisingly insightful. It also kills time on the treadmill (always a bennie).

Therefore, I guess  it doesn't seem odd that instead of thinking of myself as blue, I try to find other colors that more closely match my emotional grid. I've been down for a couple of weeks now; it comes and goes in various intensities, but I've been consistently sad and/or fragile and/or angry for a while now. Part of what makes me sad, I suspect, is the fact that this isn't new. I was this way for a long, long time before, and it was only about two years ago that I changed into the person I now want desperately to be again: someone who was fun, and game, and who felt everything so intensely.

It sounds incredibly cheesy and Rom-Com-ish, but it's true. There were a lot of things wrong with the place I was in these last two years, but I can remember being happy. Happy to the point of incandescence. Happy to the point of spinning in circles until I fell down (I'll be twenty this year, but most people tell me I was born forty and have gotten more middle-aged since then). I cannot have what I had at seventeen. There are a lot of really terrible things I did and felt that I never want to repeat; yet at the same time, I'd give anything to go back and do it all over again. Self-flagellation and fear at it's finest, ladies and gentlemen.

There's a post on here called The Definition of Happiness. Occasionally, I have these moments of epiphany where the world reveals one small mystery to me and I feel blessed. But the deeper my fog, the louder those revelations need to be and the harder it is for me to see the woods, let alone the trees.

Happiness feeds itself; unhappiness is the same. I am a blue person anyway (in terms of my personality's coloring). I like the softer, more melancholy shades of twilight and evening: violet, cobalt, lavender, mauve, midnight blue and rose. I prefer dark-colored clothes too; in high school, most of my wardrobe was black, because it was the most forgiving shade. That's one of the signs I've noticed (among others) that I'm backsliding.

When I was happy, I bought bright, pretty things. Delicate dresses, pretty shoes; shorts and skirts and flirty little tops. I did things to my hair, played with my face to make my eyes bigger or my mouth redder. No more. I haven't yet descended into sweatpants every day, but I do wear running shorts and sweatshirts. I am in hiding, and whereas before I'd never known any different, now I have the pain and guilt and regret of what I lost - or unknowingly gave up.

Confidence, like happiness, comes from within. Confident people are content within themselves; happy people radiate happiness. I feel small and tired and dark: a pebble, a piece of driftwood; a lost cloud. I don't go shopping anymore. I don't go out with friends that often. I don't write as much either, and I've slipped into the realm of nonresponses - I go away from people. I drift.

This is the cobalt world I inhabit. Not exclusively, and not forever, but I don't want to be in this place again. I want what I had, and I can't have it, so I have to move on and find it in another form. My colors are soothing and mild, but they can also rage with black despair. Don't underestimate despair; it's a powerful force.

People (my therapist) try to tell me that a lot of my 'suffering' is unnecessary. But at the same time, I see things, or hear things, and know that whatever I feel is so small and insignificant it seems criminal to complain or ask for help. I must be strong; I must stand up and carry my burdens. I don't believe that we are given burdens beyond our ability to bear. So how can I ask for help when my burdens are, as another post joked, First World Problems? I haven't been abused, or displaced, or wounded. I'm not starving, I'm not poor. I have water and heat and clothes and food and the chance to expand my mind. I am intelligent (I think) and capable (I hope) and strong (I don't know).

All my life, I've tried to swallow everything unpleasant or petty, mean or selfish or arrogant or cruel. Maybe it's a lifetime of these emotions that's weighing me down now. I'd hoped my Lost Year had dealt with all this; maybe it did, and this is new. That's discouraging; like garbage, it builds up so quickly.

I don't know.
I don't know.
I just don't know.

A term I recently learned is 'Flattening of Affect' or it's milder form 'Blunting of Affect.' I think it's called depression, and that I have it. I just don't...respond. I'm indifferent. I haven't seen my boyfriend (for a lot of reasons, but this is one) in almost two weeks. He lives twenty minutes away from me.

I have this suspicion that I lack the ability to self soothe. I don't really want to list all my problems here (who wants to read that?), but they all dovetail together the same way my colors on the Wheel do. Depression. Anxiety. Insomnia. Disordered eating. Blunting of Affect. Alone, any of these is scary. Together, the picture they paint is my private Scream. My mother tells me that when I was a baby and I cried at night, she gave up leaving me to cry because I never stopped. I'm stubborn to a degree that borders on self-destructive; Anorexia requires discipline, but to the exclusion of reason. Even as an infant, a few months old, I lacked the ability to self-soothe. I push people away in relationships; I sever all acquiantance rather than attempt salvaging them. Solitude calms me down, but too long alone and bad things happen in my head.

Blue colors are pretty, but they are the colors of the evening, the end of day, of nighttime. They are the colors of winter, and sleeping things. Dying things. I am a sleeping thing, and if I don't do something, I won't wake up.

I am colors (wedges) 23 - 18.

WolfGrrl