Firstly, the post I alluded to on my new site is complete. Reads, subscriptions, bookmarks and/or comments are appreciated.

Much of my life, especially recent years, I've struggled with the expression of emotions. This is different from understanding emotions and people, which I think I do pretty well (I have yet to mis-guess the mbti of people I know in real life, though I did stumble over the mbti's of some facebook friends). When I asked a friend on what she thought emotions were for, she responded: gxah, I'll try my best to preserve your anonymity.

Emotions certainly have helped bridge differences between humans. Body language actually accounts for the majority of in-person communication, not vocal. While it has come a long way, we should recognize emotions first formed in our limbic systems as fear, excitement, love, in our mammalian ancestors as tools for the survival and development. After all, fear is incentive to stay alive, excitement to amass resources, love to reproduce, etc. Over centuries, however, along the origin of our species we developed the unique neocortex for primates to choose rational thinking for our decision making process. Yet, we still relied on the limbic system due to its benefit of lower mental energy consumption and instant gratification. In our society today, such motivations still manifest in the form of drugs, sex, pornography, etc. which continues to lead people astray.

This is not to say I believe emotions should be outright eradicated (though it might be possible with brain-machine interfaces), but that we should understand how we deal with emotions and express it in appropriate ways, something I now understand after years of being misguided.

Many years ago, I really, really liked this girl. But she told me (many times) she didn't feel the same way. Today, I would immediately redraw my investment after the first such response, but being the hard-headed boy I was back then I dwelled in my emotions and continued on. By my current value system, I basically became dysfunctional, and (over) thought how I could get her to requite my feelings. I exaggerated the implied meanings of meaningless actions of hers to persuade myself I had a chance (cognitive bias), so it didn't help when my friends sort of entertained themselves watching me rather than straight up telling me to give up.

The reason why I believe I was so hard-headed, other than I am hard-headed (still) in everything I want to achieve, is the failures of my previous crushes. I got my first crush in 5th grade, and her being 100% extrovert and me 100% introvert, never found the chance to approach her. She left me hanging on a cliff when she left after the year. My second crush, also in 5th grade, rejected me in all-caps with explicit language on Skype and blocked me after finding out I like her, the worst part being I was bad at English and couldn't understand half her swear words and sarcasm (searching it up afterwards was more painful). Having been treated like nothing for years at that point, these failures only fed my dogged determination to prove others wrong, and is probably why shiningsunnyday the avenger was so hard-headed for this girl.

Granted, this was unfair for her, the vessel for my journey to expressing my identity, but she helped me grow in ways I wouldn't have otherwise. In fact, spending sleepless nights on threads on "how to get a girl to like you" developed my EQ, humor, and social skills a lot, and is why I'm interested and plan to study more psychology in college.

This would've been a terrific self-development journey, bar the one devil in the details: most of our communication took place online. This led to stagnate my ability to express emotions.

As one of my biggest weaknesses, expression of emotions is tough not because of this girl, but also because my time growing up. Having my parents divorced in third grade (and also being the only child) never allowed me to be in the influence of genuine expressions of emotions, since my parents would "act" whenever I'm around, and it certainly doesn't help that they're both terrible actors.

Though I may seem stoned time-to-time, this doesn't mean I don't feel emotions. In fact, I probably do more than anyone, because emotions that're meant to be expressed remain bottled up in me often. I take pride in my ability to "fake" my behavior to act like anyone (since years of being alone in elementary school allowed me to observe and study all types of social behavior). As a defensive measure, my solution as of now is to catch my emotions, make sure it doesn't get in the way of productivity, and dilute it in different ways, like writing blog posts or rapping on stage to the cheers of a crowd. So all in all, I feel really comfortable with my mechanisms of dealing with emotions. It's actually an amazing lifestyle to have, not having to worry about emotions getting in the way - like cruising through college with a scholarship as opposed to loans. I can also choose to trap and activate emotions, just to analyze them or for fun.

I also find myself liking girls as frequently as any normal teen, which feels natural as long as I don't fall for one, which I've yet to experience ever since the subject "girl" of this post. I find myself liking many girls, often those who possess an non-empty subset of the characteristics I desire in a partner.

I do worry of the possibility of being hacked, however - if a girl ever gets me in an emotional chokehold, aka love. Love, unlike "like", is unfamiliar waters for me (my most recent experience being the "girl"), so I plan to stay away from it as best as I can, until after marriage. If it does come up, I am confident in my immune system to get rid of the parasite before it begins its damage.

Hopefully, you found this post intriguing and applicable.