I've always wondered if I was dramatizing my own emotions or if I was in fact truely feeling what I percieved. There have been times in my life when I have written friends or myself, when I have spoken, or when I have just expressed my feelings that I have felt that maybe, perhaps, what I was feeling was pretend. Not like I was purposely making myself feel a way or feel an abundance of a certain emotion but as if everything I was feeling was muted, not fake, but some kind of sub-emotional reactions. I guess I wonder if my emotions are justifiable, if I have a right to feel the way I do. Of course I do have a right to emotion and any emotion that I choose. Its the choosing part that is confusing. I believe that everyone has a choice about emotion. You can choose to be angry, you can choose to be happy. Its just doing it that matters.

When Josh was still gay (that sounds so silly) he and I read a set of books by Mercedes Lackey together, the first being Magic's Pawn. The protagonist, Vanyel, is an aristocratic teenager that lives with his family in a castle a good three days horseback ride from the main city of the kingdom. Oh, just by the way, these people have magic and fun stuff like that but no guns or bazookas, just fyi. Vanyel is tormented by his father and the rest of his family because he is not a huge man of brute strength but a slender agile fighter and musician. Because of this constant torment he begins to seperate himself and he goes into this ice mode in which he doesn't allow anything to effect him in any way. He surrenders to the ice and keeps himself from feeling joy, happiness, fear, oppression, anything but constant emptiness. He hates it and yet it was his choice. He put himself through it, no one else did. It's quite silly and yet amazingly enticing. We all do it. We all choose emptiness at some point in our life whether we want to admit it or not. I know I have. I guess its just part of learning but you would thing that we could learn from those who had gone before us. History shouldn't have to repeat itself but it almost always does. Maybe we just need to wake up and smell the coffee, get a good whiff of it and say, wait a minute, I don't have to do that again. Its a nice thought.