It can be difficult to tell if you are depressed or just hungry, if you are anxious or you just need to poop. According to an article on my internet browser’s reading list (between “List of Demons in the Ars Goetia” and “Earth’s Most Stunning Natural Fractal Patterns,”) the emotions of fear, happiness and sadness are all based on common neural building blocks. Thanks to a year spent phoning it in to AP Pyschology, I know about the two-factor theory of emotion, which posits that a physiological arousal state precedes the actual labeling of an emotion. A study in which male subjects would cross either a low to the ground bridge or a precarious suspension bridge of terror found that the men who were high above the ground and feeling it in the soles of their feet were way more likely to flirt with the hot research assistant. Sexual arousal was in actuality mislabeled fear. It all comes from from the same primordial abyss of adrenaline and the human need to survive. These men were duped by their frightened boners. If I have made any egregious mistakes in my understanding of psychology, please send me an email so I can respond in an overly aggressive manner. Heated words will be exchanged, we will arrange to fight that very evening, and as fists collide with muscle and flesh, our heart rates will soar, our pupils will dilate, and it might just be love.
So what to do when experiencing confusing emotions? You can’t bottle them up because those suckers will come out when you’re taking a summer term class and decide to see Maleficent with your friend/housemate. As soon as Maleficent loses her wings you will lose your cool. It’s a 97 minute runtime and you will be weeping for 75 of them. Seven years prior the same thing happened with The Corpse Bride but you just don’t learn do you? You can’t understand your emotions but you can assign an arbitrary explanation for them. Usually I take whoever I have a crush on at a given time and blame the weird stirrings on them — also a very bad idea! I would like to take this time to apologize to specific members of the Yorktown High School theatre department who will remain unnamed. You kids have been through enough.
All things considered, it can be difficult to differentiate normal feelings from unhealthy feelings. On the other hand, not really. If you are on a European river cruise with your family and your family got a great deal on the cruise because your father’s cousin used to work as a ballroom dancer on the cruise line, and if your father’s cousin won best ballroom dancer in Austria one year, and you spend all your time in this situation reading The Bell Jar (which is the only book you brought other than your diary) and staring at the river water instead of enjoying the old world splendor of Europe, then maybe that is not so normal.
Now, I’ve never struggled with mental illness, because it’s always worked out great for me. Guys never say rude things to me on the street because my face implies that I am not having a good time, that I have never had a good time and I might be hiding a two-by-four with a nail in it somewhere on my person. I can never bring myself to do my laundry, which means there is always a soft pile of clothing for my tired friends to sleep on when they don’t want to walk back home at night. I have largely come to terms with death because I spent 2012 praying for it. A few branches of my family tree are soaked with weird chemicals but luckily that part is also all about strategic marriage, choosing highly emotionally stable mates with strong bones. The genes have been watered down to the perfect cocktail of “vaguely miserable but still down to party.” The last time I was the type of sad where it feels like your bones are waterlogged, I left my laundry pile to go to a FIFE party where I met the most beautiful Newfoundland dog and listened to anti-folk with her on the vice-president’s bed. Sidenote: FIFE parties are incredible chill and so are FIFE members so if you are ever trying to talk smack about them please email me so we can fight and maybe fall in love.
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