Emotional Intelligence

From the Wikipedia: Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups.

Obviously the entire sentence is from Wikipedia, but I am mainly concerned with the first bit, control of one's own emotions.

I somewhat doubt how in control you can be of your emotions. I think that feelings are wild things. But how you choose to process and express these is the true mark of how advanced you are in this arena.

I fail, regularly. Often aided by C₂H₅OH. None of these are my proudest moments, but they do serve to remind me that I need to find a better way to process what I am feeling. That I need to not only work to develop my emotional intelligence, but my emotional vocabulary.

I struggle to find a way to address things that are bothering me, in relationships in particular, without having my thoughts sound like an accusation. I suppose that maybe I am making the wrong choices up front if the things that bother me are also things that could be taken as an attack. It’s never so simple as “I wish you would take out the garbage more often.” or other minutiae.

But, let’s get to the point, shall we? This is obviously a self-serving venue, where I can air, to no one in particular, save those bots that crawl my posts every time a new one goes up, the trials and tribulations of my not-so-young-these-days adult life.

I’m raw, angst-y, and pissed. I both love and hate these times because I fluctuate wildly between shining moments of clarity and ridiculously clouded moments of pain.

I didn’t trust this from the outset, but I took a leap, and landed somewhere shitty. Though, I can only begin to imagine how much more painful this would have been had I acquiesced to the original “plan” that the two lives become twined immediately via the signing of a lease on a shared space. 2 short months was all it took to explode what neither of us worked very hard to build, but… at the very least we were sharing a space and had the preliminary conversations about sharing a life. Quite obviously, this has not worked out.

There is plenty of blame to pass around, I suppose – though I feel that there is less on my shoulders than his. Sadly, as previously mentioned, I am not a master or myself, nor my emotions, especially when I start to feel disrespected and/or wronged. I tried very hard to not let “just hanging out with friends” get to me, but at the end of the month/week/day my frustration over what I felt like should have actually been a real conversation along the lines of “So, I’ve made this new friend, and I’m finding that I really enjoy the time that I spend with her. I’m not sure what that means for us, but maybe we should talk about it.” instead turned into nights that I spent alone, not knowing what was going on, and the times that we did spend together, often spent in silence. I held my tongue because… why? Because I didn’t want it to be true, partly, and also because I didn’t want questions to come out like accusations. I don’t know how to broach that subject/raise that line of conversation without it becoming combative, but, on some level, I think that the only reason that it would become combative would be if it were true. So I guess I held my peace because I was scared of the truth.

I do that a lot.

The reason given was that “We are just too different.” but, well, I’m allowed to call bullshit… there is no one to stop me, and no one to call me on mine in this area. I know that we were different; I was interested in that, in new experiences, new points of view, and new stories. But, possibly the differences were just too great to overcome.

Maybe not everyone gets off on the fuzzy feeling of going to bed at the same time and listening to someone walk around the house turning off lights, or waking up just a little bit before the alarm clock goes off and having the person next to you roll over and drape their arm across your form. Don’t get me wrong, the big moments, those are great too, but the simple stuff is what sticks in my heart every time.

“I can change! I can change!” – Maybe at a certain point we can’t. I couldn’t be the girl that was okay with so many nights alone. I couldn’t be the girl that was okay with knowing that “the girl from work” who I saw coming a million miles way was commanding so much time and attention, taking away from a freshly-formed relationship where we should have been building a history of shared experiences, and sharing our past so that we each had a better sense of where the other was coming from. I don’t think I can ever be that person. I deserve someone who will share their life with me. Who will care for me in the same measure that I care for them. Talk is cheap, as they say. It’s not enough to just say that you love someone, you have to demonstrate that.

So, I mourn this, and I wake up angry – but that will stop eventually. I work to master myself throughout the day, because the quiet moments, where everything seems to stop and I can just feel my heart beating, are especially rough. I’m not sure that this muscle is breaking, but it’s bruised.