Practicality vs. Emotion

I'm not sure how much of this I've mentioned previously - though it probably doesn't matter, considering most likely you do not actually have all of this memorized - but for the past few years I have been living in a sort of state of enforced autism.

It started as an angry, confused reaction to the surrounding groups' behaviour scaring, hurting, and disappointing me, and continued for the same reasons, but under the guise of practicality. Where before I had sterilized my behaviour of emotion because it made me more vulnerable, an easier target, and people weren't worth it, I now stumbled through life like a soulless droid because I discovered that I could, it made everything much easier - at least in any immediate way - and seemed on the whole a more "practical" way of approaching things.

So yeah, I call bullshit. While being dead outside might make some specific things mildly easier, it doesn't justify itself in the long run, "practicality"-wise, simply for the fact that if it did, many, many more people would be doing it - and not just the neurologically inclined. No, the benefit of leading a diluted social existence is that it prevents you from having to actually deal with other human beings.

I am no longer stupid enough to think that personal vulnerability and people's foibles constitute a good enough reason to refrain from living life, but I'm still sufficiently emotionally stunted to feel they do most of the time. And I still use "practicality" as a rational pretext for this kind of diseased thinking. I mean, you can mathematize till the cows come home but who'd give a shit? Only the people who feel enough to care.

So that's what I'm trying to do lately. Let go a bit of the practical/rational/anal absolute fucking control over everything and have a little more faith in myself and what I'm doing and trust in people and my instincts.

The thing is, about this process, that it's very difficult to measure. Only today it occurred to me that this is in the very nature of what I'm trying to effect. It's not measured and calculated - it's done and you hope that it's done enough. Not every action has to be immediately hermetically sealed if you have faith in the general spirit of what you are trying to do.

What's occasioned this was an in retrospect rather amusing meeting with the psychologist where I tried to communicate my wish to move from a practically-minded approach to these meetings to a more emotionally-based one, all the while being frustrated by the fact that my emotionally-motivated blabbering (confusion, specifically) seemed to render the attempt impractical. It was he who suggested you can't take a practical approach to reducing practicalness. Good point. What I can practically do is instruct myself to just chill out a little. Have a little faith and don't feel that the onus is on you to complete everything you're immediately doing as flawlessly and completely as possible. You need to put your heart into it; not your sharpened critical faculties.

I'll be surprised if anybody understands the last bit of that last paragraph, but that's the third consecutive one I'm closing with gushings about faith. So, in the hope I get the message, I will conclude.

Have a vaguely related awesome song from an awesome movie: