Getting emotional

When I was in grade one or two, kids made fun of my laugh. I was also informed by several adults that “big boys don’t cry”. So I did my best to stop laughing or crying. By about grade eight, I decided that I needed to do something about this. I was tired of bottling myself up out of fear of ridicule and rejection. I had few friends. I was small, scrawny, and stubbornly liked what I wanted to like. I had no desire to be cool or popular, yet I was still letting others control how I would or would not express myself. It was time for a change. When I started high school, I decided to also start expressing emotions.

Now, you can’t control what emotions you feel, but in grades six, seven and eight, I took an acting class after school. I learned how to portray emotions, and that portraying emotions can cause you to begin to feel them. I decided to start with laughter. Happiness is a desirable emotion, and laughter is a sign of happiness. It wasn’t easy. Most people don’t laugh, so I couldn’t copy someone else. I tried to force laughter out in appropriate situations, but most of the time I made little noise while my shoulders shook like I was trying to fly. Over the next few years, though, I worked on it and now have a loud, boisterous laugh that people recognize me for.

There have been some problems with this. I remember attending a local play, and the woman beside me glared at me and asked, “Are you going to laugh like that through the whole play?” I swapped seats with a friend during intermission, but still could not shake my self-consciousness enough to laugh again during the show. But I wasn’t stopped for good, and I had positive experiences as well. Another show I attended, the director came out and found me during the intermission. He said, “Everyone is so glad you’re here. You should hear them backstage. They know when Quester’s here, someone will actually laugh at all the jokes.”

Having performed in community theatre, I know how important that can be.

Just last year, after a movie, a young woman approached me and said, “Are you Quester? I’m your cousin. I heard you were living in town, now. Your laugh sounds just like Grandpa Bill’s.”

Her grandfather and mine were brothers. I had never met “Grandpa Bill”, but found this encounter amusing.

Crying was harder, but I worked at it. I cry, now, during certain movies or while reading certain books. I cried at the end of The Dance of Time and Echoes of Honour is often good at jerking some tears out of me. Sometimes, though, I need to remind myself that I am allowed to do this.

Sometimes, I find myself crying at sad things in my own life, or that of others. This is harder for me, though, and rarer, too. I sometimes try to force the tears through breathing techniques I have learned in acting classes, with the thought that expressing emotions is healthy.

Anger can be the hardest one, as it seems to be least accepted by people. Try to express a little anger, and people get afraid and offended. Most of the time, I find that when I express anger, what I feel is fear. I do get actually angry, sometimes, but I don’t always know what to do about it. I often find myself simply trying to work it off through physical exercise.

Mostly, I tend to be rather phlegmatic. I worked at expressing emotions for years, trying to engage in human behaviour and express how I feel. Most of the time, though, I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know how to express it. Some people say I come across as passionate, but I wonder if that has more to do with twenty-five years training and experience in public speaking. People aren’t accustomed to others speaking clearly about anything, so when I do, it sounds like I’m taking special care to get my thoughts across. I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot with all the accusations and declarations about and from “angry atheists”. A lot of people have a lot to be angry about. Maybe I, too, will become angry at theism or theists for a period of time. Maybe I would be now, if I was better with the whole anger thing. But as things currently stand, unless I see something that will directly hurt someone I care about, someone demonstrates to me that I have hurt someone I care about, or someone tries to put me in a position where I will hurt someone I care about, the main emotion I tend to feel is mild amusement.

Is this good, bad, otherwise? I don’t know, and (amusingly enough) I don’t really know how I feel about it. It is who I am, right now, though. If nothing else, that’s somewhere to start.