I’ve never been much for polite conversation and the cliched “How-are-you?” “Fine. You?” exchange. At the very least, I’d rather be creative about how I go about lying when the truth is obviously unwelcome or inappropriate.
While this personal quirk might lead to a too-much-information moment, I find myself actually thinking about “how I am,” sometimes pausing for a second to mull it over.
“Good question, actually. How am I? How do I feel?”
The old noggin stirs around in its vocabulary and offers up a nice soup of possible answers. Tired. Pathetic. Guilty. Angry. Numb. Like guessing at the ingredients in an unfamiliar dish going by the smell alone.
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I know that one of the reasons relationships fail is purely chemical. The routine of the everyday becomes boring and we go into dopamine withdrawal. We take each other for granted, we stop flirting, courting, trying new things together. The addict in our skull cries out for a hit and finds none forthcoming. We go into deep funks and start looking around for a cause. And what are we likely to see? The person we spend the most time with. Oh, must be their fault. Surely, it couldn’t be me. I hang out with other people and I feel great (i.e. I get plenty of dopamine.) Even the scientific method absolves me and convicts you.
Knowing all of this doesn’t seem to change any of the chemistry of it (i.e. we still feel like shit). The self-help du jour says moods are a choice and we can (nay must) learn to control them. Now, I suppose I can agree with the gist of this–the spirit of the law if not the letter. But it comes off as self-esteem / positive-thinking / law of attraction in a different guise. The common flaw is too much emphasis on feelings and not nearly enough on behavior.
Patient: “Hey, doc, it hurts when I do this.”
Doctor: “Well stop doing that.”
And, I’d have to add, go do something else.