Momma's gone to therapy. I've been therapized.
The thing I'm struggling with most in therapy is not referring to my soul all the time. I don't believe in souls so it's kind of funny to learn that I basically can't express "I'm happy" or "I'm sad" without making reference to my vessel of morality and my ride to the afterlife. Truthfully souls are real in the same way that an image of a pipe est un pipe. Eughhh. We refer to our emotions geographically (less and less with time) and the soul is simply a place that certain emotions affect. "That poem touched my soul." is this statement true? Is it stated with the intent of being believed? Probably not, simply expressing that the feelings of the poem hit deeper. This isn't really talking about spiritual feelings but the depth and placement of these feelings, spiritual references in emotional dialogue tends to also connatatively imply the length of impact. "Woah, that sucks" sounds temporary whereas "That hurts my soul" sounds like it's made a meaningful impact you carry with you. Whether or not we recognize it we refer to our soul as sensitive and fragile, something that doesn't heal or scar but is wounded and bleed forever (and without exception, is something we figuratively carry with us until death; one can't part with their soul as they can their arm or eyes or even heart). When we invoke our own spiritual being to express how we felt, we do so with a pretty heavy sense of severity...Which is why I bring up my soul so often because I'm a drama queen who loovvveeesss hyperbole.
This is coolio except for the fact it's not. If I speak of my soul in the way that I'd like to then I'll wind up muddying the waters, trapping my therapist to sort out the bizarre layers of fiction and theory that I like to express myself with. If I speak of my soul real often then he probs won't notice how often I'm using excessively horrible language to express genuinely minor things. I have to carry myself and monitor how I speak which is, like, the opposite of fun.
At one point in my most recent session I talked about the feeling of losing time and being too tuned out from myself and the world around me. He asked how that made me feel and, at a loss for words, I genuinely attempted to express that it made me feel like my soul had the texture of a gummy-dry mouth. Which is true, that's how I've viewed that specific feeling since I was a child- but it isn't helpful diagnostically and it's completely impossible to navigate the implications of that hyper-specific explanation without having felt that exact same feeling yourself. So I attempted to pivot last second to skip around mention of my soul and wound up completely confusing what I said at all.
I'm very prone to self-reflection though my esoteric idols and disordered goals means that I'm not a more likable individual for it, rather I'm just more me as a result. An issue with this is that my language seems molded around the goal of better capturing my feelings to explain them back to myself. The issue is that I already know how I feel because I felt it, feeling a feeling is self-expression to begin with so feeling a feeling then feeling out an explanation to describe the feeling to yourself is genuinely kind of pointless. Uwaa. Things like 'sad' don't really help you understand how sad feels but once that word was invented all of a sudden you could tell your mom that you were sad and now someone knew how you felt.
Whatever, right? It kinda doesn't matter at all.
My therapist said that I might be concealing a memory. Isn't that exciting? Kind of a wacky thing to say session 2, right? It's true, though, I am. That was a good read. I know I am. I'm about 30% forgotten and 40% unmade and 20% invisible, so the rest is just meat.
I got a wisdom tooth pulled and was on laughing gas (great stuff btw) and during it I was shocked to realize that I was both high and not high. I was there in a hazy world of dry rubbing hands and I was also gone somewhere stone cold. It was like growing two heads and bouncing my consciousness between them at will! I could make myself sober at any moment and think coherently or I could let myself be strange, which I did so I could go to sleep and get my shit yanked but it was the oddest feeling. My high mind somehow perfectly envisioned a small cone in the back of my mind that I always knew was there, that it couldn't be touched by anything. It's like a small panic room that I can stay in when everything else has been addled but I can never interact with it otherwise. The black box of the mind where my soul is stored. I can get thoughts from that cone but I've only influenced those thoughts that once. It's not an irrational voice in the back of my mind but a sane rational one. It's always been there too.
I think I often get caught up in this feeling like I'm two people. If I stop to focus on myself too much then I'll realize how quick I am to split myself further, of course, I'm just one person. It doesn't feel that way though... Like conscious and unconscious are two different people with visible tangible presences in my life so I characterize and animize them as being two people. Really though if I check out then I can leave my body to a third, an autopilot. It feels like conscious and unconscious are two bubbles housed within a third. Fourthly is the cone, the true self. It feels weird but by all means that's the me I recognize to be me and me's not even them. She's he's me. Like the real me is in the back of my head and I'm simply the conscious. I like to think that cone is a reasonable, competant adult.
In short. I think that's subconsciously viewing myself this way is unhelpful and partially why my language is so oriented around describing myself to myself and also why maybe I've lost so much of my childhood.
