Fun With Thesaurus

Fun With Thesaurus

Today I realized that my life would be easier if I were a person born with the following attributes:

cool, deadpan, detached, dispassionate, distant, impassive, impersonal, matter-of-fact, non-emotional, remote, reserved, thick-skinned, straight-faced, businesslike, common-sensical, constructive, doable, down-to-earth, efficient, empirical, factual, feasible, functional, handy, hard-boiled, matter-of-fact, nuts-and-bolts, operative, orderly, practicable, pragmatic

Whereas I am, at my core:

deep-seated, emotional, innate, inner, instinctive, interior, internal, visceral, cognizant, conscious, easily affected, emotional, feeling, fine, high-strung, hypersensitive, impressible, keen, knowing, nervous, perceiving, perceptive, precarious, precise, psychic, reactive, receptive, responsive, seeing, sensatory, sensile, sensorial, sensory, sentient, supersensitive, susceptible

So I find myself thrown by one event, albeit a rather dramatic and even briefly locally-newsworthy event, into a place of sadness, rumination and questioning. Whereas others who experienced the same event seem to have shrugged it off, tossed it aside, categorized it, forged ahead and moved on, I feel that it has unlocked a Pandora’s box in my head, so that each dark butterfly that’s been locked away in there is swirling around in my brain beseeching me to exam it, to know it, to analyze it, to interpret it, and, if necessary, to grieve for it. I feel the need to go deeply into the experience into order to process it, and that has caused bursts of sadness, a unusual amount of fatigue, and a mind and heart pulled in many directions as one window opens into another and another and another, each new view vying for attention.

I wish I were someone who could toss it off as just another luckily harmless incident in an institution in which incidents are the norm, and leave it at that.  But, although I spend most of my days costumed in a matter-of-fact persona, “introverted poet” and “thick-skinned pragmatist” are two different animals, and one will never be transformed into another.

At least in tough times, us sensitive folk can always count on .gifs bearing large cats:

--Kristen McHenry