BURIED EMOTIONS!!!

A friend of mine has the gift of being able to instantly sense the state of emotions in any room that she enters, no matter if these are overt or suppressed. She has often received grief from her friends and family for always trying to delve into the emotions and affairs of others, but she says it is as easy for her to ignore her friends’ emotional and mental states as it is for her to ignore one of them suddenly turning up with an amputated limb. I recently met with her for an afternoon and after we had been talking for a while she suddenly narrows her eyes and asks:

‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

‘Wrong?’ I ask ‘Nothing.. Why do you ask?’

Well, you look kind of unhappy.. unsettled in some way..’

‘Really? That's odd. I don’t know of any particular reason I would be unhappy.. I mean there are a couple of things that I feel below the surface, unresolved things, but I am not aware of being unhappy as such.’

‘I don’t know,’ she says ‘I mean for instance you have been frowning since you sat down, or else giving me strained smiles’

‘Hmm...’ I frown – this time I am aware of it - and think about what she is saying.

I hesitate to argue with her because not two days earlier, another friend of mine had asked me how I felt about some people close to me with whom I currently have a strained relationship. My immediate response was that beyond a general feeling of disconnectedness with them, I only felt a little worried about their well being and maybe mild irritation whenever we had our never ending disagreements. Further questioning by her however revealed that in fact I feel deeply hurt, misunderstood, unsupported and confused - a FAR cry from what I had thought!! This gave me pause at the time, and now it came back to me, so I decided to think more deeply about what might be manifesting so clearly on my face and in my demeanor that my friend had been able to pick it up straight away.

Today morning (two days later), I am sitting in the University library completely absorbed with reading some books on the craft of writing short stories and the biographies of famous short story writers when the thought comes to me (not for the first time either): ‘I do not want to be teaching in my faculty, I REALLY do not!! I want to be getting my business off the ground. I want to be writing fiction. I want to be watching people on the street and making up stories. I want to be creating something new. I do NOT want to be teaching in my faculty!!’

The dissatisfaction with my job has been a recurring theme over the last four months or so; I was sure I had resolved it in December, but then following some new considerations in January, I reneged on my previous decision but obviously my subconscious is trying to tell me that I have not resolved the issue to its satisfaction. This weekend my friend and I also discussed the importance of following one’s bliss, and maybe when my subconscious receives these kinds of information (and it receives them on a daily!), it factors them into its evaluation of my decisions. On a conscious level I know that the see-sawing over the decision to quit stems mainly from one thing: WHERE and HOW I will I do my PhD. Being employed by a university all through one’s PhD study, or at the very least at the time one completes one’s application brings with it such advantages that it is currently unthinkable for me to quit. If I could only find a way around this, life would be MUCH better!! I have thought and thought and THOUGHT about how to get around this, but I am coming up completely blank!! No wonder I had buried the whole business.

Ah well, my friend’s observation has at least forced me to look at this problem again, and I think I have clarified it further – if I can find a way around the PhD problem, then I will, if not, then I will look for ways to make the best of a bad situation; at the very least I will relive my poor spirit from the burden of unresolved problems.