Sometimes I wonder about my brain,
And why, you make ask?
For that I have a simple response:
My heart feels conflict, angst, sadness,
And happiness, love, and joy,
But my brain?
My brain has to process all this emotion,
Within a few seconds,
And create responses in my system, that I don’t quite understand,
But which lead to more feelings,
More feelings,
More feelings.
I wonder whether my brain feels tired, at times,
What, with how emotional I am as a person, and
How easy it is to make me cry, and make me laugh.
I wonder if my brain ever feels exhausted,
That it’s had enough of these feelings,
That it’s time for them to be bottled up.
I think about this not because I am tired,
Rather because I think about closing off my tap of feelings,
Not showing them at all,
Slowly teach myself how to un-feel, and un-know,
And slip fast into a quiet life of merely being.
Being.
Being unaffected by disappointment,
Being unfazed by last-minute challenges,
Being over-enthusiastic about simple joys,
Just,
Being.
Feeling,
But not showing.
And never,
Never, asking for any help.
Ironically, however,
It is not my heart,
But my brain that makes me realize,
That showing these feelings is what makes me who I am,
The disappointment, the anguish,
The pain, the heartbreak,
The enthusiasm about small things.
Allows me to live, without conceding, within four grey-walled buildings.
Because hiding my feelings would mean losing to these surroundings,
And accepting a cruel fate
That no one here notices if you’re not talking the same,
Or thinking the same,
Or that you’ve started to go to class a little late
That you are not a part of anybody’s world,
And that you have to rely on yourself.
Because things have not been okay in the past few weeks,
But you’ll shrug it off nonetheless.
And never really deal with it,
But just crush it all inside.
And that crushes me.
Brain, are you tired of thinking about feelings?
Explain to me if you are.
Let’s talk about these difficult things,
And fight this feeling war.
Tejas Rao 