card zero

winter blues, walking off cliffs, and logic vs. emotion.

The first day of December was beautiful. It’s one of my favorite months, so of course I think it was beautiful, but December really does have a certain look to it— the low-hanging sun, the washed-out light, the cold snaps— that makes it feel simultaneously soft and sharp. It’s a brittle sort of pastel. Additionally, the first day of December was the first time I had seen frost since the early spring. I was delighted. I’m obsessed with blue, with that particular shade of December sky, the jut of roofs through the mist, how quiet it is. I lived inside a robin’s nest, and I was about to grow wings and burst out of the cornflower-colored eggshell stillness. I was going to fly.

The first day of December was beautiful for about four hours and then it promptly went to shit, at which point it was still beautiful, in addition to being shitty. The long story short is that I tried to go outside but ended up vomiting twice and getting a black eye from passing out face-first. I walked off a cliff. It happens. I’m kind of used to it by now. That doesn’t stop it from breaking my heart every single time, though. Wanting to go outside is a very simple desire— being unable to fulfill something that should be achievable is arguably worse than being unable to achieve a big, distant dream, because you’re never expecting that you won’t be able to do it until you’re right there, needing to go home. So then you’ve got a broken heart, and you sit in the shower with the lights off until the water runs cold and you do the dishes hunched over and then you lay in bed while the world, the beautiful December world, goes on without you. As I said, it happens. I’m used to it. And then, after all that, you probably write a long journal entry that could be considered a linguistic equivalent to those memes where an emo werewolf is riding a motorcycle or sitting under a tree or sulking in the rain.

The point is that I am asking for forgiveness. I am asking for your forgiveness— forgive me for whining in my journal and forgetting the beautiful world, for using the second person as a way of detaching myself from the events of my own life, for being a person (and therefore irredeemable), for being the specific type of person that writes thinkpieces they’re absolutely not qualified to write, for having done some bad things, for the bad things I will inevitably do in the future, for whatever else I might need absolution from. I am also asking my own forgiveness because I was fucking around with my tarot cards (forgive me for being the kind of person that owns tarot cards!) and immediately pulled the Fool. I am asking for my own forgiveness because I pulled the Fool, and that means I’m going to do it to myself again. More vomiting. More black eyes. More broken-heartedness. I’m going to do it again and again and again. Forgive me.

The second day of December started with me going into the kitchen, sitting on a bar stool, and then deliberately falling off of it. I’m still thinking in metaphors because I’m that kind of asshole. Then, two hours later, I went into a free consultation with a psychologist and left with a new therapist.

It’s not enough to change my mind, to yell I was wrong! I’m going back on what I said earlier! The world does not want to hurt me, not really, and the idea that it does came from my resentment of past hurt and my fear of future hurt! I spoke from a feeling and the feeling was false! because, quite simply, knowing that the world doesn’t want to hurt me will not stop it from hurting me. Which it will. It will hurt me, or I will hurt myself while playing on it, and then I’m going to want to cry and lick my wounds and hide myself away. I’m going to start interpreting the world through my heart, and that will likely kill me because the world is very good at breaking hearts. I’m going to live in the false feeling. It will not end well.

My old dog used to be like that. The first time he ever stuck his head out a car window, he bumped his chin and promptly decided to never do it again. My sibling was the same. When our parents put bar stools in the kitchen, my sibling fell off once and I fell off constantly, which tended to surprise people because I was supposed to be the smart one. It was abundantly clear from a young age that my sibling had very big emotions and I didn’t; ergo, I was the left brain and they were the right brain.¹ I’d like to clarify that it’s not about intelligence— emotionality doesn’t automatically mean stupidity, which is something that a lot of people don’t seem to have realized yet, to the detriment of everyone. It was the 2000s, though, so the adults in our life hadn’t realized that yet and were acting under the assumption that I was rational and my sibling was not. But why was I the one falling off the stool? If I was so smart, why did I keep hurting myself over and over again?

Culturally speaking, there’s been an emotional renaissance. Like never before, we are seeing people take pride in their sensitivity, their empathy, and their natural ability to feel deeply, among other things. A lot of self-help ideology can be bullshit, especially things that originated on the internet, but embracing the validity of emotions is a psychologically-proven good thing.² In response to that, we’ve seen some people take it slightly too far, mainly due to thinking that “valid” means all emotions are justified and righteous, and we’ve also seen a lot of advice that tells us to completely open our hearts and dive headfirst into living through feelings.

I don’t disagree, but I think it’s a little more complex than that. With the emotional renaissance, there’s also been a logical recession. Subconsciously, we’re still societally operating under the same neuromyth that emotions and logic are on the opposite ends of a sliding scale, and you have to give up or consider one to be bad to participate in or view the other as good. It used to be that logic was good and emotions were bad. Now, the things we now associate with being logical tend to have negative connotations— repression, taxes, the patriarchal anti-hysteria witch hunt, being no fun, etcetera. Logic is now unfashionable. Long live emotion.

The kicker here is that logic isn’t actually unfashionable at all, but repackaged. To phrase it simply, it’s not a sliding scale and it never has been, despite how we see it culturally— there’s logic in emotion, and there’s emotion in logic. It’s Ouroboric. It’s Yin and Yang. You cannot have one without the other. Aside from the fact that most forms of oppression actively eschew emotionality, seeing it as a sign of weakness or a threat, a lot of things that those oppressive systems consider to be “logical” are reactionary responses, which are inherently based in emotion. On the other side of that, decisions that are considered “emotionally healthy” are typically based in logic, not feelings.

You want to know what living through feelings with a completely open heart looks like? It looks like learning your lesson. It looks like never putting your head out the car window again, or never falling off the stool again, or any of the hundreds of examples people have of doing something once and then never doing it again because it hurt. Every living thing has evolved to dislike and avoid pain— the only exception is when we feel like it’s pain we deserve, in which case the pain feels good— because pain is typically a sign that you’re in danger. Maybe it was that simple once upon a time, but anything can feel like pain in this particular world, even if it helps us. Resetting a dislocated joint hurts, but it can’t heal properly without it. Ending a relationship hurts, but the relationship wouldn’t be ending if one or both parties didn’t need it to end, so it’s absolutely for the better. Some pain is essential for growth. That’s not an idea you can adopt when acting solely out of emotion— that would look more like avoiding any and all pain because you don’t like feeling bad and you’re scared of it. It is rooted in logic.

When I was little, falling off the stool did have logic behind it. It didn’t seem like it because it wasn’t necessarily a smart choice, but I was weighing the joy I got from squirming around against the potential repercussions of falling off and getting hurt. Continuing to move around while sitting down felt good— we later discovered that was due to my hypermobility, which makes it difficult to be comfortable in a neutral resting position— and falling off the stool wasn’t even that painful, so why not keep squirming around? It was a calculated decision to risk a little pain for the sake of joy, logic for the sake of emotion.

Of course, I’m not advocating for deliberately staying in a harmful or painful situation, and I’m certainly not advocating for total reliance on logic. The point is that logic and emotion are both entirely neutral forces, and there must be balance. It’s not sustainable to live with your heart wide open because it’s not sustainable to live with a broken heart. It’s also not sustainable to close your heart off to everything. Emotional and intellectual health relies on being able to discern when you have to sit in it and when you have to let it go, and that’s not an easy thing to learn or an easy decision to make. There’s no “but” to that sentence. It’s hard and it sucks and it hurts and you’ll inevitably fuck up on some occasions, and you need to learn it anyways.

I knew how to do it when I was little, but somewhere along the line, I think I forgot how to. Life suddenly seemed to have an excess of pain and fear. Understandably, it’s kind of terrifying to wake up one day and suddenly realize that you can’t go outside without throwing up or fainting or intense nausea. I’d like to think there’s a future where I don’t have to deal with that, at least not to that degree. Maybe I’m an idiot to keep trying. I think making the logical choice sometimes means that you need to be an idiot, though. So forgive me for my broken-heartedness, because I needed to feel it before my heart heals up, at which point you will need to forgive me for being an idiot and inevitably breaking it again.

The third day of December is just as beautiful as the first, even though it doesn’t have the symbolic meaning of beginnings attached to it. Miraculously, I managed to draw the Fool again. It’s been upright both times. Forgive me for my superstitions, too, because I can’t help but think it’s a sign. The deck I use is my aunt’s old one from the 90s³— it still smells faintly of patchouli and Parliaments— and this particular fool is Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and rebirth, rosy-cheeked and grinning while stepping off a cliff.

I understand why he would take that leap of faith. I understand it because I live inside a robin’s nest, and I’m about to grow wings and burst out of the cornflower-colored eggshell stillness. I’m going to fly. Forgive me.

1. The left side of the brain is supposedly the more analytical and orderly hemisphere, while the right side is more based in creativity and feeling— people are thought to be “left-brained” if they’re logical and “right-brained” if they’re emotional. This has since been proven inaccurate, because although certain parts of the brain have specific functions, the brain works as a whole.

2. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-emotional-validation-425336, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/validation-defusing-intense-emotions-202308142961

3. After looking it up just now, it turns out it’s Trisha Newell’s 1986 Mythic Tarot Deck. Auctions for a full deck in good condition tend to go over $200 from what I’ve seen, which means I probably shouldn’t have been beating the shit out of it for the past decade the way that I have.