Re: An Overwhelming Feeling--Thanks for Responding

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: : The greatest thing about this message board is finding people in the world who love to talk about their feelings. Think about it. Try talking about how you feel with people you meet a dinner party, or outside of class, or work. Anyway, I'm grateful to have shared past thoughts with you all and to eavesdrop on other threads between you. : : * * * : : Something that has happened to me over the course of my life, but have actually paid attention to it more as I have gotten older. Wonder if anyone can interpret? And if it's a bad thing, can tell me ways to counterract. : : I notice it happen mostly as we approach a weekend. On days when I have a million things to do, it doesn't happen. I am a very disciplined person about keeping up with the day-to-day chores and can't begin to enjoy myself [even emotionally in my head] until they are done. But say, I wake up on a Saturday, it's a beautiful day, a week of work is behind me, I have this glorious day ahead of me, and as always in a city there are lots of things to do. But instead, I walk around, as if in a daze, never able to fine tune how I want the day to unfold, but hoping, wishing, searching for...I don't know, something magical to happen (for lack of a better phrase). While I am walking, I find myself doing something I was always told as a child was bad form--I find myself a voyeur staring at people going about their, sometimes they catch me looking into their eyes as they pass me, and I look away at the last second in tremendous fear. But I am getting something positive (I don't know what it is) from looking at them and even overhearing bits and pieces of their conversations. They all seem so caught up in what they are doing, and I find myself wondering where they go off to, what happens to them after I pass, as if there is some secret going on in the City they know but won't tell me of. : : At the end of this day, maybe I go out for dinner by myself (unlike some people I am not afraid to go to movies, plays, or restaurants by myself). I usually appear very relaxed by this point, those my feelings won't calm down. If I choose a fast food or store front type place, these feelings seem to short circuit themselves, but many times I might choose a comfortable restaurant or old movie palace with old fashioned decor, and then I find myself behaving again like James Stewart in Vertigo. If the evening is particularly warm (heat of summer) or very cold (deep winter), full moon out, I walk, knowing this and, with not much to do, I should go home, but I find myself taking the long way home deliberately so that I can pass a bunch of places I used to go, to see if they are still there, or have been torn down and replaced. I again watch people, fascinated by their very being, look, dress and conversation. : : Then I come home, usually feeling (gosh I don't know the feeling--not depressed, not exhilarated, somewhere in the middle). If I happen to see people who I know from the past and they remember me, I am not so in my depths I fail to say hello, and they certainly don't detect anything from my pleasantness. It's usually very fast small talk. Then I walk on. : : I live near a lake and find myself sometimes going there to sit on the large rocks and stare out to sea. Another place I gravitate toward when in the suburbs is a large park with a walking path around it, that was a garbage dump when I was a child. I go to this park to walk the perimeter because all sorts of feelings come up for when I walk it, but they never come into focus enough for me to understand why I am walking. All I know is this place is peaceful and beautiful with swing sets and tennis courts and a couple of ponds, and I find myself trying to ask questions as I walk it. Six years I returned to my old elementary school when I was very depressed (the only time in my life this depressed) and walked around the place, feeling very comforted somehow on the playground. : : Strange huh? Am I describing something fourish? Nineish? or Alien? (as in hey kid, when is your return trip to Pluto?) : *** : 9/14 : Thanks guys for responding. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't thinking of something so out of the ballpark as to be impossible. [Hal, if you are depressed, then yes, don't pay too much attention, knowing your mood will shift upward again just like it has before.] : Like all complicated issues, my guess is this one does just have one explanation. : This is my guess: : (1) I read somewhere that sensitive people particularly (and fours are this group) will periodically have times when, for no real reason, they find themselves almost as if by trance heading toward old haunting grounds with an overwhelming desire to just cry. In my case this always happens when I feel very unsatisfied emotionally in my present life, in a way that eating an ice cream cone or asking for a raise I know deep down isn't going to make me feel any better. I read that these experiences are the person's soul crying out for their original essence, what that person was before birth. It's funny because I read about this soulful essence years ago when I was clinically depressed and here is Don Riso's new book "The Wisdom of the Enneagram" talking about essence at the end of the four section of the book. He may have been using the term differently though. : (2) I forgot to mention in my earlier message that sometimes when I look into the eyes of these passersby, I have this overwhelming desire to get between them with one arm around each of their shoulders and say something friendly like "How are you both" with a big honest smile on my face, nothing mocking (OR) an overwhelming desire to just hug them and not let go for two minutes. : In the four sections of the Enneagram books there is a discussion of fours wanting/desperately needing to reach out to people but feeling so unworthy and ashamed of doing so because we feel we are defective in some way. This may be a deepseated desire on my part to throw caution to wind and go with a gut impulse to show these people and thereby the world that I am a truly caring person. : (3) Particularly on full moon evenings and in atmospheric settings I will start wishing about something unattainable but lovely, that something magical will transdend itself before my very eyes and take me away from the present. This may be my difficulty as a four just accepting that my ordinary, everyday life (get up, brush teeth, go to work, etc.--what bothered Cory in his message) is special in its own right because I own it, instead of having to show myself and the world that I am unique and above the ordinary. Mixed with this notion may be that desire for the unattainable perfect lover, that one they come into view, shows their flaws and is no longer desired. Then when they go away, the four's desire for them goes strong again. That push/pull thing. : I think the above (3) things may be what is happening to me in those described moments. To let go of it is the hard part because, as the books say, those moments while melancholic are feeding my soul in some way...There's such a moment in "Rebecca" where Max De Winters wife (a four) does not succumb to Mrs. Danvers desire for her to jump out of the window (the four's suicidal tendency when really unhealthy), and then there's all the commotion down below on the moors, searching because the body that they thought was long dead buried in crypt was found in the boat floating on the ocean floor. As a four, I see her race down the staircase onto the misty moors looking for her husband trying to discern what happened, and the plot is suspended at this moment, heightened because you don't know where it is going to go, but out on the moors in the dark mist of early morning, not knowing, but excited with anticipation...well, a scene such as that, depressing to others, will be ambrosia for a four.

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