To Be Eaten Alive

What do you do when everything seems to be consuming you in your 20s

The title is quite misleading.

For as long as I’ve been alive, it feels like emotions have always consumed me, it is not restricted to this particular decade of my life.

An A on an assessment makes an okay day the best day ever. An unexpected bill creates the worst day ever and everything becomes terrible. Even recently, at my sister’s birthday dinner, I beat her in the volume of happy tears shed at the table. We had to send the waiters back with the cake because I had set off a chain of bawling.

Long story short, I’ve always been emotional. My dad used to repeat “manage your emotions” like a mantra practically every week because I struggled to regulate anger and melancholy.

It’s a pleasure experiencing life intensely when it is going well, i.e. a new job, a life-saving day out with friends, the emergence of a new romantic connection. There is no high that can match the euphoria that manages to stretch its body across all aspects of your life.

But, in accordance with the laws of equilibrium, what happens on one side, must happen on the other. So, when challenges arise, the dial on intensity remains switched on high and it literally feels like life is falling apart. Whether that be a breakup, a job rejection, or a fight with your favourite family member, the world stops. The pieces are left scattered on the puzzle; they seem like they were never meant to fit in the first place.

As I said, I’ve always been told that I’m too emotional and sometimes these emotions obscure the hard facts. Nevertheless, I am learned in rationality. I can read Aurelius’ Meditations from cover to cover or sit and write essays about the 1910 British National Health Crisis, all things that deal in examining the hard facts and bending them to suit your position.

But, when it comes to my personal life, I am unable to see past the varnish of my emotions which become consumed by memories. Consumed by an insatiable desire to go back to the past, to how things were. You cannot manipulate the hard facts of your personal life, you either accept them or leave them behind.

It is a similar story for people. As much as we may wish to, we cannot make people malleable. Unlike historical narratives, we cannot mould them like pieces of evidence to fit our personal beliefs and wants. They have free will to do whatever they please in the spaces they occupy in your life (shock horror).

Full transparency, I actually don’t have an answer to the question I posed. Of course I have the generics; immerse yourself deeper into your hobbies, keep regular contact with your loved ones, maintain motion, lose your mind at the gym etc. Perhaps generic is the wrong word, universal is more fitting. They are universal because they tend to work.

These bits and pieces of advice that are fed to us are all contingent on a specific factor - time. With time, the gym no longer feels like you are fleeing from your restless mind, it becomes a sanctuary. With time, your hobbies retake pole position as your first love and are no longer ghosts of the old you.

Whenever I feel consumption creeping in, I welcome it gingerly. I sit uncomfortably with my uninvited guests and avoid the things that make me, me.

It might be refusing to finish a book that I was previously enamoured of, or disrupting my gym schedule or expressing dissatisfaction with my safe foods. These acts are a physiological reminder that things are not okay. And these reminders crawl all over me until I find the courage to be honest with myself, to verbally remind myself that the world will continue moving, so I must too.

I hope as I grow wiser, I am able to maintain the intensity surrounding the passions in my life whilst no longer being devastated by changes and challenges. I am in search of the imperfect equilibrium.

**RY RY WORLD and MASTER > To Be Eaten Alive