On Being Affective – A Review

I’m a bit emotional, for hopefully understandable reasons. I hope you’ll forgive how that breaks my usual extremely stoic exterior :P

As a result this blog is rated PG-13. As I have allotted my single use of the F-word.

I don’t want to say it was easy, because I don’t want to lie. I’m not afraid of appearing weak. I’m not afraid of having emotions. And I’m clearly not afraid of sharing them.

But everything I’ve been feeling has been weird. It turns out, people are deep and layered. And it also turns out that I’m a people too. So, anyone who was still holding onto the bet that I wasn’t, I’m sorry, but it’s time to pay up.

I’m leaving today. Or well. I suppose I should say that I’ve left. And now a lot of different things have hit me really hard, and at really weird moments. Saying goodbye was tough. Really tough. Don’t ever let anyone pretend like it’s easy.

To answer your questions: I’m not nervous. I’m not worried. I’m not doing this to prove anything, but sometimes I feel like I should be. I know I’m not alone. I know I’ve got a good family that’s actually eager to support me. And yes, I know, there will be better coffee in the city.

But that doesn’t stop me from having a sinking feeling in my stomach. That doesn’t make me wonder if I’m going to have to prove myself when I get there. That doesn’t make me feel less alone. That won’t stop me from missing them, and it won’t stop me from wanting to be show them an independent me. And those New York coffee shops won’t have my friends in them. They’re not places my brother and I went to whenever he had free time on the weekend. They don’t have the baristas that I share a mutual feeling of vague recognition with.

There’s so much that’s changing, and I’m a creature of habit. I’m someone who obsessively sticks to comforts, because that’s how my brain is wired. And right now, I’m not nervous about losing old ones, or finding new ones, but there’s this deep vortex inside of me telling me that I have to be. That I’m feeling wrong. That I’m missing something.

I think that’s a common feeling in airports.

But. I want to make it clear that I don’t feel misplaced. But I feel like I should. I have all sorts of misconceptions and ideas about what should be happening to me. And I think that’s only made worse by a generic feeling that life is happening to me, rather than I am happening to life. I mean after all, life encompasses so much, and I occupy a space equal only to my body’s volume. The space I occupy, to an extent, limits the effect I might have on the vastness that is life and the universe.

So, who am I to expect anything less than a world that guides my hands. A world that directs and propels me in the directions it intends to. Who am I to question a path, a life on rails, who am I to say this isn’t a world pre-decided?

I’m Connor Roxby Sorensen, nice-to-fucking-meet-you.

The universe is infinitely large. Life, as we know it, isn’t. There are biological, social, and metaphysical limits on it. This whole bustling ecosystem of people. Whether they’re confined to the house you grew up in, the town you were born in, or the Dallas airport, they’re all made up of individuals. Bouncing off other individuals. Filled with things built by teams of individuals. You’re one of those individuals. I’m one of those individuals.

I have a choice, and so do you. The choice is pretty simple, whether or not life is pre-ordained by the laws of physics, God, or whatever, you get to decide to let it affect you or not.

Right now? I feel sick to my stomach. I have for the past few days. That sickness not only came from this overwhelming feeling that life was happening to me, and not the other way around, but also that there was this fundamental emotion of dread or excitement that I was missing. But I’m only here for so many years, and then life loses me forever. Life will be around when I’m dead, it was even around before I was born. It’s the constant, and I’m the variable. So why should I spend a single second thinking that the woman sitting on the floor across from me can’t afford the autonomy of a life that’s an open book, one that’s constantly being written.

Is there a reason to believe the world is a machine that was set in motion millennia ago? Sure. But does it change anything if I decide to live as if it’s not? Nope.

The world is a tangled weave of chains, mesh, ivy, wires, and rubber tubes. But all those knots don’t have to stay knotted. And the corner of that “mess,” you live on doesn’t have to remain messy. We both get to decide how active or passive of a role our participation on this stringy mess of a universe is. That role can be limited by the scope of your past and future, or expanded to be defined by a collection of thoughts and ideas that are alive right here and right now.

You’re free to choose how “free” you think life is. And you’re free to decide how much that question affects you.

But me? I’m tired of feeling affected.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be around on Friday to tell you all about how a new place in this great space is affected by me, until then, have a great rest of your week.