Numb.

For various reasons, I've been taking pills. You know, to make me feel okay. It can be quite like a weight on my chest. I could breathe, barely, but I cannot smell. I can open my eyes, but cannot see. It's nothing. Not darkness, not black, I was feel nothing.

A pill altered my life,—and, perhaps more importantly—my personality. The stuff that makes you one in eight billion, what we value most about the self. The rarity of that internal, personal, emotional essence grows more and more, the more folks forget to use condoms, the less often people take their last breaths, and hopefully for them, in hospital beds rather than in a large swathe of fire accompanied by wails for help.

Given prior circumstances, numb was better. Not good, just better. I went from a complicated pit with nuanced ridges to the flat surface above. I wouldn't say it was bad, to have pain ebbed away. All feelings and opinions pushed aside, and I was left with.. nothing. I felt like a passenger in a train watching the trees and forests fleetingly scrape my window to never see me again. I wanted to feel something again, truly feel that my short time here has meaning.

I think you get my point. I was, for a while, fine with hitting the lows again, if it meant I could feel something again.

The nuances of emotions can tire you out when you're in that pit far too long, but it's multi-dimensional, isn't it? There's left, and right, up, and down, front, and back, blue, white, pink.. it's infinite.

All our actions and desires are motivated by feelings. Our thoughts have them. Emotions are an innate part of the human experience, perhaps the core one. We're not manufactured for feeling, to get some survival or evolutionary advantage necessarily. I mean, I wouldn't describe mental illness as a survival response.

Emotions are the most valuable thing we have, the only phenomenon that we can say we truly possess.

It can be difficult, to feel inhuman. To Gorilla Glue a shield that weighs ten tons on your chest.

The Tale of The Princess Kaguya

I love this movie. Possibly the best movie ever. But hey, that's debatable.

Spoliers Ahead

Premise: A girl from the moon broke a few rules so she could get banished to Earth, feel emotions, and have the human experience. This is revealed later on.

At first, Kaguya's childhood is joyfully spent with her peers, appreciating Earth and its natural gifts. When her adoptive father transforms her life into that of birthright nobility, she starts feeling pain and falls into a deep depressive pit. As she "runs away", she asks help from the moon for supernatural abilities. And ooh, check this out!

The running away scene was hard to watch. You know who was definitely watching?

The Moon.

Right over there! 

At the end, Kaguya is taken away by the Moonfolk because she asked for help in a dire circumstance. They say it's so she would no longer feel the impurities of Earth. Our Princess makes the argument that, along with grief and sorrow, there is also happiness, joy, warmth, simple pleasures..

And then,

Her memory is erased.

And she could no longer feel.

I'm not sure how I feel about pills telling me what not to feel. Every other thing tells me what to feel. I'm not sure what I'll choose. But right now, I like feeling human.