A Sudden Change

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My sudden change: an abrupt decision to fall back on the essay* form because the idea I had for this subject has been derailed by working, sleeping, doing life tasks, being completely out of energy, or accompanying someone to San Antonio for the concert of an iconic goth singer and then to the art museum so I feel like There's Something in It for Me.

I wanted to write something, possibly in list form, exploring a phenomenon that fascinates and preoccupies me: that pinpoint of a second where everything changes inside, either from okay (or even actively happy) to sad, disappointed, angry, regretful, let down, disillusioned; or from sad and discouraged to somewhere between "actually, everything is going to be okay" and "actually, everything is more than okay the way it is." Part of my fascination with this is not being sure if other people experience this as strongly** and part of it is the intersection of the physical and the mental--what, exactly, is going on in there when this happens? What kind of electrical signals and changes in chemical substances are happening? And why, in those instances when there's not a concrete exterior reason for the change, like  coffee or some particularly transporting music? What prompted it then?

It seems like this is something best described in fiction; saying, "I was feeling happy, then I had a conversation with an important person in my life that suddenly went off the rails" doesn't do it justice. Nor does, "I was feeling pretty crappy, and then I suddenly felt not just okay but positively serene for a few minutes." A couple of years ago I read the Rabbit series by John Updike*** and was struck by how good he was at portraying that moment when everything goes downhill between two people. Maybe it's something best recounted blow by blow. 

In the spirit of this enterprise (writing something unnecessary and unrelated to life obligations every week without too much concern for quality, valuing regularity instead), I'm going to publish this and move on. 


*"Essay" turns out to be a fancy word for just saying what I'm thinking in the order it comes out.
**It's become clear that not only do I have a lot of feelings, dissecting them is one of my hobbies; so I suspect that while I may not have more feelings per se than your average person, I experience them more granularly. You could say I'm a feelings nerd.
***Except Rabbit is Rich, which I somehow missed.


Next subject: picture frames (because that's what I happened to be looking at just now).

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