A world of words.

Walkin’ like a one man army
Fightin’ with the shadows in your head
Livin’ out the same old moment
Knowin’ you’d be better off instead
If you could only

Say what you need to say
- John Mayer, Say

If only I could, John, if only I could.

I live in a world of words, as most do. My days are filled with them. Reading materials pertaining to my field of interest. Listening to well-scripted presentations. Discussing new findings. Writing papers. Lecturing students. For all intensive purposes, grad school is a lengthy training course on research development and writing.

The cornerstone of Academia is sharing ideas. Journal articles and textbooks are read in order to formulate research questions, for which experimental methods are developed to test those hypotheses. Months are put in gathering data and days of complicated statistical analyses to draw conclusions from the results. All so a paper or two can be written emphasizing the significance of those findings. As a further test of one’s writing skills, the original paper is condensed into a single paragraph abstract that will ultimately make or break the entire thing. Eventually, those original papers are revised and reformatted, with each version sent to a conference committee or a respectable journal. The hope is it will be deemed worthy of inclusion in said conference or journal, leading to a presentation or publication. From there, slides highlighting points and posters displays are made and presented. Leading to more questions and the cycle begins again.

Therefore, existing in a professional domain where Intellectual Property is of the highest value, I am worthless if I’m unable to appropriately articulate my thoughts and ideas. My right of passage is the ominous dissertation, a word I imagine makes even those not faced with one cringe, and an oral defense of the work. The path to the promise land of tenureship is paved with published articles, awarded grants, and conference presentations/lectures. Effective writing and speaking is a necessity and I do, in fact, possess those ever-so-important communication skills. The point of all of this is to say I am perfectly capable of accurately expressing my ideas and thoughts.

Yet, those honed skills and abilities have not filtered into the rest of my life. In my personal life, I'm inept with regards to self-expression. It is as if I've lost my words, or at the very least, lost my control over them. My ideas are brief images that I neither have the time with or words to describe. In some cases, I’m simply unsure what I’m feeling. I seem to have no means of describing my emotions. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not necessarily a lack of vocabulary. There's a disconnection between my internal experience and those labels.

Throughout my childhood, I was told and shown my feelings were unacceptable and had severe repercussions. My stoic father punished me for crying, pouting, arguing, or any other reaction to a situation. I was to be still and quiet, not allowing anything to affect me. My emotionally needy mother often took my feelings from me. Whatever was bothering me was much harder on her, or, if it wasn’t, dealing with my display of emotion was, leaving me as the one to consol her. I was told my negative thoughts would hurt those I cared about. Specifically, if I were to ever feel any amount of anger towards my mother it would destroy her, leading to her suicide. I was terrified to hold a thought or feeling in my mind for more than a second, for fear something terrible would happen. My solution was therefore to have none, and pushed them all safely away.

Now, the problem is they are so foreign to me I can’t even comprehend such feelings and thoughts, let alone explain them. My communication skills fail me. The part of my brain able to speak is detached from that which feels. It makes therapy a difficult, frustrating process and personal relationships a struggle.

But, how can I be so articulate in one part of my life while the other continues to lag so far behind? Why is this turmoil stuck in my head with no way to escape? How do I let it out? How do I learn to differentiate feelings and explain them? Have I missed that stage in my development, leaving me trapped in this place of confusion and frustration?

Have no fear for givin’ in
Have no fear for givin’ over
You better know that in the end
It’s better to say too much
Then to never say what you need to say.

I hear ya, John. It's just harder than it sounds.