Non-surgical connotations

There's a specific reason I haven't written much lately and it's not laziness (for once). I've just been having trouble figuring out how to talk about what's been going on with me this year. It all stems from a decision at the end of last school year, when I felt a need to be more connected with people, that I would be more open-hearted in my life.

Someone asked me what I mean by open-hearted and I was going to say I meant it literally but that has surgical connotations. The best way to describe it was to open myself up emotionally to other people, to make my inner self more accessible and to look for emotional connections and not just intellectual ones. That sounds very touchy-feely pop psychology, but it was a big deal for me. On a practical level, I think if you asked my students if I was emotionally open to them this year they would pretty much all say that I was. I really shared myself. Sometimes things got a little raw (I'd never had a student casually describe me as being a mess before) because I'm still figuring out how my brain is wired, and it was hard to anticipate what the consequences of that decision would be.

My lack of foresight isn't the problem; the difficulty is that if you're going to open your heart, it's not just about letting things out. It creates the possibility that other people are going to enter in some fashion. As far as I know, that's the whole idea. And that's in fact what happened, in many ways and on many levels. It's been fascinating and frustrating, exciting and infuriating, disheartening at times and fulfilling at many others. My life has been more multifaceted, and the thing is, if you look at the facets closely enough you notice that most if not all of them are multifaceted as well.

This was an unusually opportune period for thinking and writing. The problem is that this blog is about me and my experiences, and one of the guiding principles of my writing this thing is that I not invade anyone's privacy, so I never write about anyone else, except perhaps casual mentions of my family. You can't have deep relationships with people who don't trust you, and the only way to earn someone's trust is to be trustworthy. If you write about someone else's feelings and experiences in your blog you are definitely not being trustworthy. This is locked down for me. I don't keep a lot about myself hidden, but other people's thoughts and lives are off limits in a public setting. When I write about other people I've always focused entirely on my reactions.

So the upshot is that on one hand I haven't had a lot of solitary experiences to write about, even though I remain in many ways the same kind of solitary creature that I've always been. I know that doesn't make sense, but take my word for it. More pop-psych here, but the cognitive dissonance (fancy term referring to dealing with inner contradictions) is in whiplash territory. But not in a bad way. See? Did it again.

That's all I have to say about this at the moment, but I needed to get it out of the way before I could move on.