I'm currently working as a receptionist this week, and will be again the second half of next week into the following week. A bit boring, but I don't mind. It's at a real estate company, and in my free time I've been looking at the properties they have. In my normal ways, I'm absorbing information, learning about real estate prices, rent prices, what areas cost what, what to expect, etc. Everything is a learning experience.
Today, after 2 days of receptionist work trying to find ways to make the time go faster, I knew what I needed to do. Reread Harry Potter. I was eleven when I read the first three books, thirteen when I read the fourth, fourteen when I read the fifth, sixteen (I think?) when I read the sixth, and eighteen when I read the seventh. The seventh one is the only one I've ever picked up for a second read, because I have this problem: my memory is sharp. Like a chef's knives. I rarely reread books, and I have to wait a significant amount of time to rewatch movies because I remember so much that there's nothing new, nothing to grab my attention, nothing that keeps me on the edge of my seat. Although, watching something in the cinema changes this. Movies on the big screen are far more potent. (Note to self: if I ever become really rich, I'm going to have a room with a home theater, and it'll be nothing but a home theater. Which also will act as a personal screening room for my work...) But enough time has passed that even though I know the plot of the first book, everything feels new, and I'm rediscovering everything.
My rediscovery is met with such a strong feeling of excitement and joy that it's all I can do to keep from squealing (I tend to make little kid noises when super happy), or from actually hyperventilating. When I finaggled my way into a PA position on an episode of Extreme Home Makeover (they were 2 streets away from my house) my mom was with me and couldn't get me to talk because I was sort of hyperventilating and boucing around and couldn't find words. When I was hired for the Olympics, I never actually told my parents. I called my mom, and because I had called her earlier that weekend telling her that a position for me was being finalized, she knew what I was calling about, and guessed it. It was all I could to do affirm her overly excited guess. She then screamed it out so that my dad and little brother found out. Anyway, the point is that my excitement rarely takes the form of words, and now in reading Harry Potter for the second time, I have no words for how wonderful this is for me. This is the world I have dreamed of living in since the moment Hagrid first told Harry he was a wizard and I read those words. Narnia was a viable second option for ideal worlds, and Middle Earth was cool but it was never my thing. Harry Potter's world, Hogwarts, has been my escape for most of my life. JK Rowling made my childhood.
It's raining today, which reminds me of England (even though it barely rained while I was there), and it feels perfect to be reading Harry Potter in the rain. In the Pacific Palisades (which looks like Puerto Rico geographically speaking). With a pumpkin spice latte to keep me warm (although now it's all gone). Also, my hair got soaked walking from the parking lot to the office, so it got all frizzy and wavy like Hermione's hair (you know I'm totally Hermione. I was nicknamed Hermione when I was eleven and people read the books and realized SHE'S TOTALLY ME). I'm from Ohio, so I'm used to just not caring that it's raining, so I didn't even bother to look for my umbrella this morning when I noticed it was raining. Might not have been the smartest idea.
I keep getting distracted by all these adorable Burberry plaid umbrellas. I really want one, but moreso I want a Burburry trench... Specifically this one:
___________________Philosophical time.
I have depression. One in five women will be diagnosed with it sometime during their lifetime. Luckily for me, it runs in the family, and I had significant emotional trauma as a child, so it was practically written in stone that I would have it. It comes and goes, I've been on and off anti-depressants for years. This is the second time I've been in therapy, because I've found it does more good than taking a little while lobotomizing pill. It's taking me on a journey of self-discovery, and I've made some small breakthroughs in the past two months.
The biggest thing I have to tackle, and that my therapist and I are trying to understand, is the emotional distance I put between even people I'd consider close to me, and myself. I'm so used to it that until the discovery (via therapy) that it was there, I'd never noticed. Now I feel like I'm looking out over this canyon and wondering how I bridge the daunting distance. The other day I was talking to Luke, and I knew what I should have been feeling, and I felt the severe emotional disconnect. It was like the emotions I should have been feeling had gone through coffee filters until it was so thoroughly diluted that I barely felt anything at all.
So what's preventing me from feeling? From connecting? The idea came up that maybe my emotions are lagging behind. I tend to shut them off for periods of time when I'm overly stressed out and then when down time comes around, deal with them then. So maybe I haven't dealt with everything from last semester yet, or more likely, I haven't dealt with the stress of graduating and moving out here yet. After the mess of my entitlement-issues kleptomaniac roommate ordeal from last semester, it took me a few months to deal with that as well, starting with 4 days of isolation in my solitary four-day drive home to Ohio. I needed that. And it was just the latest in a long-standing pattern.
I've come to realize that processing things externally is hard for me. I internalize things and deal with it entirely inside. You know how in X-Men: First Class how Kevin Bacon's character absorbs energy, and can keep it inside of himself? He brings it inward, deals with it, and then can do what he wants with it. That's sort of how I handle things. Talking to someone about things is hard, and everything goes through a series of filters before it ever leaves my mouth. My therapist noted last night that even when talking about being frustrated by a situation when I noticed a severe emotional distance between someone I happen to rather like and myself, I didn't even display frustration. She could see signs of it in my face, and hear the undertone of it in my voice, but otherwise it wasn't present. Other people have said that my emotions, and what's going through my head, is often present in my face, but little elsewhere.
I suppose my filters are so strong that little comes in, and little goes out. But I feel. Inside this shell of my filters I feel so much, and people never know, because I don't let them.
I want to stop having this huge distance, but I don't know how. It's been as natural as breathing (no really, it is) for years. My entire adult life, at the least, with roots that may date back to my childhood. I've only become aware of it in the past few weeks, and now I want to change it, with no idea how to, and no idea where to even start.
