The World According to Gio

This isn't really meta as much as random navelgazing and rationalizing of what might be perceived as personal shortcomings by people with different frames of reference, but it's something I spent a lot of time thinking about last night after reading a post in somebody else's journal about misc people interpreting being a private person (i.e. lack of public emoting) as being horribly, horribly wrong and quite possibly the defining feature of some serious fuckedupness (brought up by the most recent ep of Stargate Atlantis, but that's neither here nor there).

See, here's the thing: my mother's family is good at emoting, they emote quite regularly and exhaustingly, often multiple times over dinner, and practically every single fight I've had with my mother over the past fifteen years or so has in some way been related to my, um, reticence emoting in the way she'd want me to (it usually starts with her complaining, "You never tell me anything about how you feel/your life/etc."). And I am not an introvert, and there are quite a few what most would consider "private" topics that I don't have any trouble discussing extensively in public (anybody on my flist probably has heard more girlbits TMI at this point than they ever wanted), except, within my frame of reference, they're not, I really don't care whether or not misc.person knows that I had misc.biopsy because frankly, if they were really determined, they could find out anyway.

But some emotions, maybe the ones that are most precious to me or that make me most fragile, at least within my frame of reference, really are private. Love is usually private. So is grief. And that upsets people, and I know it does (I don't think my mother ever got quite over the fact that I did no emoting at my grandfather's funeral), but that doesn't change the fact a) I still experience the emotion and b) I cannot bring myself to do so publicly under most circumstances (I probably do more emoting here, on filter, than I would ever do face-to-face, too, because there's an element of dissociation here).

And in many ways, I find the kind of public emoting that seems to be the rage these days very distasteful: my personal concept of hell is going on misc.talkshow to spend an hour discussing [generic] your emotions.

And many of the people I choose to surround myself with probably share that outlook--thus frames of reference. For instance, despite the fact that Casper and I have a completely codependent and probably borderline unhealthy relationship, we don't really ever tell each other how we feel about each other (actually, the few conversations we've had that somehow involved discussing emotion were a) conducted under extremely high stress, and b) the most uncomfortable time we've ever spent together). But just because we don't say it doesn't mean I don't know that he probably cares more about me than anyone else, because I know that by everything he does, like wiping up my puke when I am sick and making sure I'm safely asleep in my room when he gets home from work every night, etc. etc. And he knows just as well how deeply I care for him, for the same reasons. And whatever else I think about the unhealthiness of our relationship, I don't think lack of emoting is what makes it kind of fucked up.

So yeah. In conclusion, not sharing your feelings |= wrong.